The drive to Auckland was uneventful, back to traffic and more than one lane in each direction. A bit of a slowdown as we hit some construction, but no problems.
Drove to the same bikeshop where we’d bought the bikes, as they said they’d buy them back. Unfortunately the original guy we’d dealt with was off, so we had to go through an extended process involving two clerks and an unseen “boss”. As we were going out of country, they wrote us a company cheque and gave us directions to their bank. Got 40% of the value back, not too bad, we just felt we didn’t have the time to utilize them as we should. They spent the majority of their time bungeed together in the back of the van.
Drove to the bank, showed the I.D., explained the situation. The teller looked up the account, and… the shadowy “boss” who signed the cheque was NOT on the list of approved cheque-signers. Great. I’d kept the original receipt, though. With phone number in hand, it was sorted out and I got my cash. Why they couldn’t simply credit the credit card or hand me cash there and then is a little odd, but not a huge hairy deal.
Denise had rented us a room for the next two nights as we were going to be vanless/homeless in Auckland. Turns out the room is actually a small apartment, complete with kitchen, laundry even a dishwasher. 7th floor, overlooking downtown. Nice place. We stopped here to check in, and unloaded some of our acquisitions, as at the campervan office we’d only left two pieces of empty luggage and we were unsure if everything would fit.
Drove north to the Kea HQ. We picked up our bags, packed them with the remaining provisions/clothing/electronica, happy we’d offloaded before. Noticed a bag has a large tear. Luggage shopping placed on the agenda for tomorrow, as I didn‘t think it‘d survive another Pacific crossing. An agent checked out the van, noticed we’d missed cleaning the microwave(fixed on the spot), but otherwise it was an easy handoff. I let her know about the oil leak/warning lamp.She noted it in a margin. We got our insurance deposit back, the shuttle driver dropped us back at the apartment. Done.
Final stats…
6470km driven (3882miles)
$981.77 in fuel costs
Highest diesel price $1.49 per liter (1st day)
Lowest price $1.23 (near the end)
Average 27-28 mpg
Not bad. We’d planned on spending roughly 2-3 times as much.
Oh yeah… 9 gigabytes of photos.
Tired from the long day of running around, doing things on someone else's
schedule again, we decided to sped a quiet night in. We made a small trip for food and picked up a few DVD’s at a vending machine (cool idea) in a nearby corner store, but the promise of a real bed and all the space meant we were soon asleep.
The movies? N.Z. a little behind us, i.e. Wall-E is in theaters now. We rented The Hulk (better than the former) and The Mist (Yet another Stephen King story that stinks, no…reeks on the big screen). Had promise, but the poor acting, cheesy virtual effects, and stilted characters all made this a chunk of poo. When the director/producer/writer goes on and on about this movie being shot fast, cheap, and on a tight time schedule, the supposed spin is this all somehow works. Reality is that it just looks slapped together. Denise couldn’t finish it.
Here’s the IMDB page….
The Mist
Goodnight.
No pics for today, but here's the skyline from someone else...
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