On the Road

We didn’t take a lot of pictures while we were driving, so here are the few we got between Auckland and Wellington.

This first group of pictures were from the day we traveled from Drury, just south of Auckland, to Rotorua. We had a lot of fun, as we drove through Morrinsville, spotting the statues of cows. They were all painted differently, and there were a lot of them! This is the only picture I managed to get, though.

The Waikato is a beautiful area!

I can’t remember which town this statue was in. It seems like a lot of towns have statues along the main road.

These next pictures were taken the next day, as we traveled from Rotorua to Taupo.

That is not a nuclear reactor. It is a geothermal power station, if I understood right.

After two days staying in Taupo with friends, we drove to Wellington. It was chilly and dark a lot of the day, but we enjoyed the scenery anyway. First, we drove around Lake Taupo.

Someone was feeling carsick, so we stopped for a few minutes. That few minutes turned into more minutes when blackberries were discovered! Gayle and the younger children ended up picking several cupfuls of blackberries for our lunch.

I believe this next area is what is known as the Desert Road. It certainly looks like a desert!

We saw several of these statues in the town of Bulls.

Toward the end of the day, the younger children were getting quite crazy. I challenged Mr. Imagination and Little Miss to see who could spot five interesting things in five minutes. After the first round or two of that, I handed out notepads to them, and a piece of paper to Mr. Sweetie and told them to draw or write a few words about every interesting thing they saw in ten minutes. This was Mr. Sweetie’s notes; the other two each had a lot of little bits of paper which I couldn’t really photograph, given where we were. That activity really helped keep them going!