Activity level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Modes of transportation: 🚗👟
Friday morning we woke up bright and early at 6am. Which was the earliest Eric had awakened in years and Sarah had since their wedding day a week prior. We spent some time setting up this blog, and packing our bags for the first time this trip. We didn’t know at the time, but we had many hours of driving ahead of us that day.
Before leaving town, we swung by the beautiful government gardens in the city center. It’s early spring in New Zealand, and we must have hit peak cherry blossom season. It was nice seeing a reminder of home 15,000 kilometers away. There were also perfectly manicured croquet fields, but we couldn’t find any equipment to play.
We also stopped by a lovely cafe which had an amazing open face Moroccan sandwich and Jack berry smoothie. Eric spent half the meal on the phone with our bank verifying that we were in fact in New Zealand. Apparently, big checks to your wedding vendors get flagged and canceled when you’re out of the country. Sorry Bobby!
From there we drove through many more beautiful pastures until we arrived at Huka Falls. Sarah also found a nice patch of daisies and suggested we take a photo.
Huka Falls was magnificent—every second, 200000 liters of water rushes out and falls 11 meters. We still don’t understand the metric system, so they put it into imperial units for us: 5 Olympic swimming pools fall every second approximately 0.12 football fields to the water below.
Crazily, we actually ran into someone we knew at Huka falls (or: they ran into us). Sarah received a message from her friend, Kimmy, from the Holy Name of Mary Choir, who saw us at Huka Falls, but didn’t say hi because she thought there was no way it would actually be Sarah. Small World! (Hi Kimmy!)
We then swung by crater walk, which was next door. Unfortunately we missed it by 15 minutes even though we arrived a full 45 minutes before closing. We tried to sneak a peak by stopping by the side of the road and looking over the hill, but they planned for people like us and put up some shrubbery.
Along the way to our next destination we stopped by a grocery store and Eric discovered his new favorite snack: Weetbix
From there, we made our way to our sleeping arrangements: a 1960s-style VW-bus inspired shack in a car park. Despite the strange arrangements, they actually did way more to make our honeymoon feel special than the first hotel: a Cadbury bar and two wine glasses (wine not provided). It was fantastic.
We dropped off our stuff and found a really small restaurant (30 seats total) called Embra that had fairly high ratings but was impossible to book according to reviews. We called, and they made an extra reservation for us. We had no idea what kind of food it would be, but it turned out to be sort of michelin-style fine-dining with multiple courses and paired wines.
The food from that meal could fill an entire post, but we’ll keep it short and just show pictures. It was French and British inspired cuisine—and the only thing we didn’t love happened to be the British-inspired dish. Sorry Britain.
One cool thing to note is that all the food was from 100 miles (or whatever that is in kilometers) from around the restaurant. We also ended up being the last guests in the restaurant, even after the chefs went home. We ate quickly, we promise!
On the way back, it started monsooning. Luckily, nobody else was on the road, because we had about 45 minutes of white-knuckle driving through a downpour.
Once we made it, the rain continued dumping throughout the night. It was so soothing to sleep, camping style, while it poured outside.
That was, until about 5 in the morning when we both woke up with bladders bursting. Of course, the bathrooms were all about a 5 minute walk away, so we had to suit up and run in the (freezing) rain. It was sort of miserable in the fun way, and we finally made it back and were able to fall back asleep for that extra snooze before our long drive.
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