My trip with Mom

One of the 150 islands at the Bay of Islands, New Zealand

Mom and I packed up our bags, picked up a rental car, and hit the road for Paihia on Sunday the 26th. Paihia is a cute little coastal town in northern New Zealand on the Bay of Islands. But FIRST.... some Jo Jo / Caleb side notes:

Jo Jo's drawings... we're not sure if we should be scared or not.

 Joelle's other artwork.

Time to say goodbye to my little flower-loving blueberry face-painter.

Play time at the park.

Caleb a month old!

 Serena says his frog belly is the perfect diaper cork. LOL!
He's grown 2 ounces a day since birth... well on his way to chunker status.
He's now 150% of his birth weight.

 We're gonna miss these little guys! Oh ya, and Serena and Riley too ;p

OK back to the trip.
Notes about the roads: Just like Thailand and Bali, in New Zealand people drive on the left side of the road. Since I've been seeing and doing this for a while now, I'm already comfortable driving this way. However, there are a few things that are different. First of all, if you want to turn left, and someone coming the other direction wants to turn right (across traffic), they have the right of way, not you. I definitely either cut someone off or sat staring at someone when it was my right of way once or twice getting used to this rule. It's the USA equivalent of not having the right of way to make a right hand turn if someone from the other side wants to turn left onto the same road. Weird huh. There's also round-a-bouts everywhere, some with 2 lanes in them which can be confusing.

When you're not used to driving on the left hand side of the road, it can be easy to veer off the left.

This is either a drunken Kiwi... or a new left-side driver. 

(cough... Mom) Who said that... what?

We stopped at some cool places on the way up the coast,

this was at an ancient kauri wood carving gallery.

I made friends with the locals.

Mom and I on the porch of the cute place she rented us

for 3 nights at the Admirals View Lodge in Paihia.

We got a free upgrade to an upstairs room, it was very comfortable with great service!

 View to the right from our porch.

View to the left from our porch.

We decided to explore the area and check out Russell accross the bay and Kerikeri up the coast. Russell was a short ferry ride over, the ferry was super speedy and fun :)

Paihia Wharf

The ferry ride to Russell.

Mom and I on the ferry.

Once we got to Russell, there was a kids swimming contest going on right at the docks. The whole town was out, and a lot of people from paihia... so you see how small it really is :)

Super amazing fig tree that's 150 years old.

We stopped at a tasty pizza place and tried the local brew, fun!

This is the oldest stone building in NZ, in Kerikeri.

After checking out the towns of Russell and Kerikeri, Mom and I went back to Paihia and bought tickets onto the Lion New Zealand for an adventure on an 80ft maxi yacht the next day. That post's coming next!