by sarah:

alright, just thought i should update our blog finally! somehow even tho we had unlimited internet at our last place, we never managed to write on our blog... hopefully we will do shorter, more frequent posts...
so... last you heard we had just started working at the art shop in thames. We had a really great time there and got to see a lot of the Coromandel Peninsula in our free time, which we had a lot of. There are a lot of great hikes in the Kaeraenga (?) Valley, with some nice swimming holes in the river that runs thru the area. One of our great feats was climbing the Pinnacles, a 9 hour round trip hike up to the top of an old volcano "plug" - there was a lot of volcanic activity in the area millions of years ago; the volcanos eroded away but some plugs remain... it was a beautiful hike with lots of scrambling at the end, but we were very tired after the "1,000 step staircase" which lasted pretty much the whole hike and included stairs cut into the stone of the mountain (they used to bring pack horses up the to bring supplies to the logging camps that used to be up there - not sure how they did it b/c it was hard for humans to climb!). needless to say, it took me about a week after the hike to be able to walk down the stairs like a normal person and not hobble about like an old lady.
we also got to explore some of the beautiful beaches in the area, including Cathedral Cove that has a giant rock that has eroded into a HUGE arch on the beach, and Hot Water beach, which has natural hot springs that come up under the sand and you can dig a hole and make your own hot tub. we had some trouble with the ocean filling our holes with cold water, but the springs were VERY hot when you would step on one. Some dolphins came by and swam along the shore - which was very cool - and everyone at the beach thought it was cool and abandoned their nice hot tubs to watch. gary then had the brilliant idea to steal the good hot tub holes and watch the dolphins from the comfort of our new actually hot hot tubs!
We had a great time in Thames, and enjoyed getting to know small town life (like knowing who everyone was in such a short time, and all the gossip involved) and worked with some really cool people. We had wanted to get second jobs but that didn't really work out as quickly as we would have liked so we decided to heat out early, and do our road trip of nz while it was still summer time!
so, we got some nice pink, purple, orange and gold spray paint and jazzed up our car Gerald, kitted him our with some nice curtains (the inside is a 70's gold color pallete), put up our sleeping platform and headed out last week! We spent a few days visiting our friends in Auckland (and found this awesome chocolate shop which coinsided perfectly with the required chocolate ingestion on Valentines day). Then we headed to Tauranga and Mt. Manguanui for a couple nights to explore that area. we then headed down the coast to see some of the beautiful beaches there ( and stayed at a campgroudn with some sweet trampolines and playground equipment (complete with giant slide and swinging log walks)). Yesteday we were in Rotorua and checked out the geothermal activity going on there, and today we experienced it at the "secret spot" - a place where a cold river meets with a hot springs river and makes the river a nice natural hot tub! it was really nice and relaxing and you could move around so you could get water ranging from almost too hot to bath tub temp, and then move over to the cool river and cool down a bit!
now we are in taupo (some say the sky dive capital of the world?) -so we should have some exciting days coming up!
-sarah
p.s. we posted some pictures a week or two ago so you can see gerald in all his glory and some of our hikes in Thames.