So, we arrived in Auckland on a beautiful day. And it quickly deteriorated. This is my story and I’m sticking to it. I forgot the name of the car agency I had made a reservation with. OMG. How could this have happened? Well, I made the reservation in Sydney and did not have a printer at my disposal and figured I’d just keep all the info on the computer. Only the computer did not work at the airport. Oh, it did work but they wanted about $10 for 20 minutes. So, things didn’t go well. There was free wi-fi access thru Samsung and we waited in line for that…only to find out that Samsung doesn’t support mobile me(Apple). How could that be? So we approached two women at an information booth and they tried to figure out who had our reservation…that did not go well. Finally, they offered me their computer and I found the reservation and printed it out. And you can just imagine Mr. J. He was beside himself. HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN? Well, shit happens when you travel. Right?
But I digress. It seems that autoslasher.com, the people that I booked through had the car rental agency as Fox. Turns out it was JUCY. What? Why? Who knows? Just another curveball. To make a long story short, we took the Jucy van to the Jucy off-site rental location. Stood in line and when we got to the counter and produced our licenses, the nice man said, “So you’ll return the car here in two days.” I said, “No. We made arrangements to drop it off in Napier (which is about 8 hours south of Auckland).” He said, “We don’t have an office in Napier.” End of Jucy.
Now rayman was really steamed. OMG. “Just how are we going to get to Taupo by dark? It’s already 2:30 (we landed about 1:00). And it’s at least a 4 hour drive. We don’t know the roads. Now what the @&** are we going to do?” This was challenging. A man was waiting for a ride back to the airport with Jucy mentioned that Europcar had locations around the country and they were next door to Jucy. So, Ray approached them and, yes, they would rent to us. I’m not even going to tell you how much this cost us. Arm and a leg comes to mind. But, it is just too embarrassing. But what could we do? Shop around? Okay, we did. After the nice man at Europcar gave us a ride to his terminal location, Ray went to Budget and I went to Avis and they wanted even more. OMG. So, Europcar it was and that’s how we got to Taupo today.
Oh, but I failed to how rayman kidnapped me. I drove for about the first hour. Then Ray took over because my eyelids kept closing…I was really tired. He took the wheel. About 2/3 of the way there he announced he wanted to stop to relieve himself and find the info on the hotel we had booked in Taupo. Only he just kept driving. And driving. And driving. Did I mention that I needed to relieve myself too? He was like on a mission from god to get to Taupo before dark. Which we DID thanks to things like overtaking trucks in 200 meters or less on uphill climbs? EEEEEEKKKKKK. That is when I accused him of holding me hostage in the car. To no avail I might add.
NZ is really interesting. As I sat on the wrong side of the car looking out, what got me was that the dirt looks unstable. Lots of interesting shaped rolling hills. Green. Lush, even. Water everywhere. Their rivers have lots of water (and trout) if you can believe the ads along the road. The main highway we took here was most 3 lanes. Part of time there were 2 lanes for one direction and then it would switch and there would be 2 lanes for the other direction. Plenty of traffic. The country feels more inhabited in a way than AU because they have so much less land mass. And we saw an abundance of cows and sheep. All those chops and steaks on the hoof. And they were all busy eating before the sun went down. At this point Ray had more in common with them than say, me!!
But I digress. We finally arrived in Taupo.
Leave Comment