Day 41 - To Wanganui (Sun 19th Dec)

This morning Chino was pretty gutted to see that the weather was shocking. It was today that he had booked a Skydive over Lake Taupo for 09:20. Waking at 08:30, Chino called the Skydiving company to check whether it would still be on, unfortunately 'no' was the answer. Gutting. Will have to wait a little longer for that opportunity.

So Chaggie thought to leave a little earlier this morning to continue their road trip to the South Island for Christmas. Today we were driving the chunk from Taupo to Wanganui where our plans were to stay with good friends of Daddy Staggie (Graeme); Jock and Sue. We left at 09:00 and had breakfast next to the Lake before Taupo.

As already mentioned, the weather today was awful. Torrential rain hit down hard onto the Honda today on our way to New Plymouth. It took about 4 hours of driving, Staggie drove the first half before Chino took over for the final leg of the journey. We had lunch in New Plymouth, was still raining so lunch was all we could do before heading to Wanganui.

Another big plan for the day was to have a helicopter ride over 'Mount Taranaki' (Mount Egmont), a 2518 -metre high mountain. This had to be cancelled also due to the weather which sucked. So driving past it was our plan B. Once we got to a spot where we could see it, we found we couldn't see much. Was a huge mountain we could tell, just couldn't see the top due to the fog!! Bummer!

Our trip to Wanganui was shortly continued, no need to stay looking at half a mountain for long. A lot earlier than planned, we got to Jock and Sue's house in quite a sunny Wanganui at 16:30. Thats right, the sun finally came out just in time for us to arrive. Jock and Sue were very welcoming hosts, we had a Pizza and settled in.

This evening we joined Jock and Sue to a Christmas celebration at the local, traditional Church. We enjoyed meeting all the locals and were given free food and wine which is always good. We returned at about 21:00 and were shattered from the amount of driving done today. A well deserved sleep was soon to come.

Chaggie x