Care to defrost your Comcast bill? Need to nuke the weekly circular?

We have encountered numerous microwave mailboxes throughout the North Island, from Gisborne to Cape Reinga, and from my google search, this is not an entirely new idea. If you're interested, here's a how-to site for you.

We've been off the grid for a bit, out of wireless range, but all over NZ's north coast. When we woke on Monday morning in Tauranga, we were certain we'd earned our first camping/parking ticket. The town/city was so swanky, we could find a designated free camping site anywhere. We had spotted a few other camper vans parked along the beach, none directly in front of the no camping signs, but a few blocks down, as if parking a bit away from where it was marked a no-no made it okay. We drove up and down the same street for twenty minutes, selecting a spot away from the prohibited signs and in front of mostly dark houses. But in the morning, there was a slip of paper on the windshield. We'd been nabbed.

But instead of a parking/camping ticket, we received a helpful ticket-sized flyer about where to park for free and for pay in Tauranga. So no fine, and useful information. Imagine if parking authorities in Philly or NY distributed parking information, instead of tickets?

The surf was flat, so we reevaluated our plan and made our way to a hot spring pool. Fernland Spa was outside of Tauranga's city center. AJ and I rented a private pool for a half hour and soaked our traveling bones. The water was delightfully hot, and I like to refer to this part of our trip as Honeymoon Soup.

But all of this relaxation would drained by the ride ahead of us. We decided to make a run for it and drive all the way to Shipwreck's Bay on the west coast. That's about 530 km and about 6 hours and 40 minutes. Basically, we'd be making a trip to Vermont with very heavy traffic in the Oranges.

The trip was long. We stopped for gas in Opotiki and passed one town after another that was nothing more than four or five houses, a school (which looked like a house), and the occasional church or general store. In Kaikohe, which had an actual downtown, we stopped at Sun City for some Chinese take-away (these are the only restaurants open late in these parts, but I should mention they do offer a variety of fried tasties, including the very popular fish and chips). A Maori family came in, and all six children raced to sit on the six spinning bar stools on the far wall. They smiled and giggled at us, and ran around the restaurant as if it were a jungle gym. All of them were shoeless, which is very common in NZ. AJ and I have seen kids and teens on the way to or from school without shoes on. And we've seen Maori and white children barefoot equally. The father or man who accompanied the children only entered the restaurant when the food arrived and he wore only socks. The mother had white converse high tops.

Post-noodles, we were back on our way, with hours to go. When we finally arrived in Ahipara, the town closest to Shipwreck's, we were exhausted. We didn't have signal and the paper maps we had didn't even indicate the roads we were on. Google maps indicated where the road ended, but we couldn't know, in the dark, that it would end on a narrow stretch of unpaved road at the edge of the beach, gated off with no trespassing/Maori land. AJ exited the van to see if there was room to turn around in front of the gate, but he had taken three or four steps when he froze, jaw tense, and high-tailed it back to the van. It was waiting to see a Maori elder with a shotgun, like Ste'en had told us about in Raglan. It was a dog, and fortunately it was tied up/fenced in.

Commence Operation What the Fuck Am I Doing, also known as turning a six-berth camper van around in the dark on a sliver of unpaved road with generous drop offs on each side. I went to the back of the camper to signal which direction AJ should turn and when to stop. He was freaking out.

AJ: Which way?
Me: Toward you now.
AJ: (silence and no movement) Which way?
Me: Toward you.
AJ: You know I'm not going to back this all the way up?
Me: Well, if you don't want to fall in a ditch, you need to keep backing up right now
AJ: What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck am I doing?
Me: (silence...in my head, I was thinking, "You're losing it, babe!"

Shipwreck's Bay could've become Camperwreck's Bay. But we made it. Burned up the clutch a bit but managed to narrow escape. And though we couldn't find a free campsite here either, we opted to park along one of the town's parks (since that's what the literature in Tauranga advised). That sleep was well earned, and unfortunately the surf was flat here too. We opted to drive back in daylight and walk along the beach, just to see the coast and where we were stuck the night before. A cute dog, who I affectionately named Frodo, followed us, or should I say, escorted us, around the point. The sky was clear and the view was spectacular. It's unclear how surfers access this point, though it's mentioned in both of AJ's surf books. You'd have to trek so far to get to the break, and I imagine you could get stuck out there during high tide.

After our walk, we decided to head up the coast to Ninety Mile Beach, where the swell was supposed to be several meters high. It wasn't, and Ninety Mile Beach Road is actually just the beach. I can't wait to share the warning sign when I can post pictures. Drivers are at their own risk, as vehicles have been lost during high tide. We decided not to risk our $5000 bond on the camper van and headed further north to the last camper van park on the North Island, in Waitiki, where further adventures of emptying our toilet cassette took place. But more of that later.