North Island - New Zealand

Our trip to New Zealand started out with a very long plane ride. Total travel time was about 20 hours. Thank goodness the plane had personal entertainment devices in each seat with movies, TV shows, and games. This helped keep me entertained when I wasn’t trying to get some sleep. We arrived in Auckland at 5:45am and our two week tour of the country started at 9:00am at Auckland Harbor. We got off the plane and hit the ground running. It was tons of fun meeting up with Mariah and Nick and seeing them again. Listed below are some of the highlights from the North Island.
One day we were able to visit White Island which is home to an active Volcano. To get to the island we had to travel 31 miles by boat.


The Bill Beesley Family! (We were short Mike and we missed him a lot, however, we were glad to have Mandy, Zane's girlfriend, on the trip with us.)
L-R Top: Rebecca, Me, Dad (Bill), Heather, Will, Zane, Mandy. Bottom: Nick, Mariah.


Mariah and I. While on the island we sported these dashing yellow hats (for safety's sake.)

It was cool to walk around the island and learn about the island's history and the volcano. The last major eruption was in 2001. Since New Zealand is in the Ring of Fire and we were on an island with an active volcano, I was ready to make a mad dash to the sea, but lucky we were safe and we just enjoyed our time on there.

One of my favorite activities on the North Island was staying in the River Valley and river rafting on Rangitikei River. The river rafting was a lot of fun. Mariah, Nick, Rebecca and I all went in a raft together. About five minutes into rafting while going down our first rapid, I fell in. :-) It was a great way to start the trip. After that I had lots of fun trying to push everyone in and getting the other rafts wet.



Are we having fun yet!?!














Some of the other adventures we experienced on the North Island were: sailing on the Waitemata Harbor, going off roading in 4 x 4 vehicles in the New Zealand bush, experiencing a traditional Maori celebration with food, dance and storytelling, stopping at Thermal Valley and seeing mud pools, mineral terraces and steaming lakes and visiting Kapiti Island where we hiked around trying to spot endangered New Zealand birds.

















Taking it easy!

Paint Job

So if you’re wondering where I've been for the past couple of weeks the answer is, in the basement painting. When a contractor tells you painting is a job you can do, but shouldn't, cause it is such a major pain, he isn’t kidding and you should listen to him. The sheetrock and trim work were finished so all we had left before the carpet was paint. I got a couple of quotes but afterwards thought to myself, how hard can it be? I can bang this job out in a couple of days. Wrong, it ended up taking a couple of weeks. It looks good now that it’s done, but painting is one DIY project I will be crossing off my list of things I can do around the house.

Web Feeds

Since it’s been a while since I last posted and I really don’t have anything new to write, I thought I would share some neat-o information about web feeds. (I know, sounds really boring, but it’s so helpful when you want to find out if a site has been recently updated or not.) I’m sure most of you Internet savvy people already know about web feeds, but for the rest of us stuck in 2005 (or whenever they first came up with feeds) this will save you lots of time. A friend told me about it, so I am passing on the knowledge. Here is how it works. At the top right corner of your browser you should see a little orange icon that looks like this,



When you go to a site you can subscribe to it and the feed icon will turn orange, it's usually gray. For example: If you want to subscribe to my blog, simply click on the icon and click on 'subscribe to this feed'. The feeds are then added to your favorites center, which is on the left hand side of your screen. You can have tons of feeds! When one is in bold it means there is new content. So, you just check your feeds everyday and see who's posted and what’s new on your favorite websites! :-)