They Call Me Mr. Scoobs!

We woke up Thursday morning to a sunny day in Auckland and got ready to begin the next leg of our trip. I was already feeling much better (thank you, Zicam!), and Dustin was miraculously still healthy despite wading through piles of my used Kleenex over the previous 72 hours. Unlike our short trip to the Bay of Islands, we knew that the bus driver and majority of backpackers we started with on this leg of the journey with Stray would probably be with us for a while, so we hoped for the best.

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Backpack, Come Back!

Our return trip to Auckland (or “Dorkland” as the Kiwis refer to it) from the Bay of Islands was mostly uneventful except for one minor adventure. We’d been driving along in our 24-seater bus for about 15 minutes when I heard a car horn blowing somewhere behind us. Dustin also noticed, and he wisely decided to look behind us to see what was up.

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A Series of Unfortunate Events

Itʼs funny how a series of seemingly small and insignificant events can change the flow of things. Laura started to feel a cold/flu coming on as we made our way up from Auckland to Paihia on the first day of our Stray bus experience (which was otherwise really fun and social). Our plan was to wake up early the following morning (Monday) and join a separate tour (included in the Stray pass weʼd purchased) that went to the far north end of New Zealand to Cape Reinga, where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean.

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Going a-Stray

On our last day in Auckland, we started to think “Hmm, maybe we should figure out where the heck we’re going from here and how we should get ourselves there.” We researched all the New Zealand-owned car rental companies, which are pretty damn cheap but use really old, high-mileage cars (one company said the Nissan we rented might be from 1998!). Having just finished months of being in logistics mode at home getting ready for a wedding and a year-long trip, we weren’t exactly excited about having to sort out mobile phone cards, booking lodging for ourselves every night, finding our way in a rental car, and deciding what to do and see everyday. Quite the intrepid travelers, no?

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Love in the Time of a Head Cold

So, when I said we’d write about the “good, the bad, and the ugly” aspects of a long trip around the world, I wasn’t expecting that the “ugly” part would make an appearance quite so soon. But my immune system seemed to have other plans.

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Auck-bland

Just a quick update on the time we spent in Auckland, New Zealand. The weather was, as they say, changeable, which basically meant that we got rained on many, many times when we went out without umbrellas because it was bright and sunny at the time. We never got soaked, but it did teach us very quickly to have our teeny little mostly useless travel umbrellas with us at all times.

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Travel Technology

Just in case you’re wondering how we’re staying connected and documenting our trip, here’s a glimpse of what world travel is like in the modern age…

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Packing It Up

One of the most common questions we got when we started telling people we were planning to travel for a year was, “How on earth are you going to pack for that?” The short answer, as it turns out, is very, very carefully.

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There Will Be Blog

Welcome to WanderLustin’ – the travel blog of wandering Lustin! We had every intention of launching this blog before we left home, but our seemingly insurmountable list of pre-trip to-do’s never let us get to it. So here we are, writing from an internet cafe in Auckland, New Zealand, trying to ignore the extremely loud Italian couple next to us who is Skype video chatting with some poor soul in the mother country who surely must be plugging his ears as they shout at him.

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