Day 4 – Thursday

This morning when we get up it is pretty cold and very overcast and looks like it could rain today. After brekky we head down to Queen Street where we are going to jump on the InnerLink bus. When we get to the bus stop, there’s a cop standing there with a dude in hand cuffs. The cop has a heap of dough in his hands so maybe this dude’s just been busted for ripping someone off. The bus we are catching is the local bus that costs $2.50 each ($10 total) and pretty much loops around the wider outskirts of the city taking in the fringe suburbs. The one thing we’ve found out about Auckland is, nothing is cheap. When I asked the bus driver if the ticket last all day he says “Nah, when you get off and you want to get back on you have to buy another ticket”. Far out, I’m thinking. Maybe that dude in handcuffs was a bus driver!!!. This bus pretty much does what the Perth CAT busses do but obviously in Perth they’re free. Anyway, the loop around took about an hour and it was really good to see the outskirts of the city. There was hardly a dead zone around the entire loop with the streets lined with shops, cafés and restaurants. Ponsonby Road, Karangahape Road and Parnell Street reminding me a lot of Mt Lawley, Leederville and Vic Park. By the time we have done the loop it has started to rain. This puts the kibosh on our next activity which was catching the ferry over to Devonport. So instead we wonder around trying to find somewhere cheap for lunch. We soon realise that “cheap” and “lunch” do not go together in Auckland so we end up buying some stuff at the supermarket and heading home to make something. The rain has set in now, it pretty much has been going non stop, just heavy enough to be annoying but after lunch we decide to find something to do indoors. We originally decide to go to the Auckland Museum thinking it was close by. But just before we leave we realise it’s a fair hike and with the rain getting harder we change our mind and head to the Maritime Museum instead. We leave the hotel and it is raining hard now. One umbrella between four of us aint cutting it so Kris and I don the rain jackets. By the time we get to the Museum we are drenched. As we approach the entrance we notice the sign on the door “last entry 2:30pm”. It’s 3:20pm….damn! We decide to find a coffee shop instead and as it turns out we end up at the coffee shop 20m from the entrance of our hotel. Could have saved ourselves an hour and a drenching by just going there in the first place. As we leave the coffee shop the rain has stopped. We head back to the apartment and research a few things, one being what we re going to do in Rotorua and we end up booking a 3 hour zip-line tour for Sunday the 27th. We then shower up and head out for dinner, to guess where? We can’t beat the quality and value of this joint so it’s spaghetti bog again. Just before we leave we check the sky and it looks like the rain is done for the day so we head out without our jackets and very small dodgy umbrella supplied by the hotel. While having dinner the rain comes back and it’s getting heavy. We finish our meal and we have to make the mad dash home in the rain always passing people with big awesome complimentary umbrellas from their hotels, Stamford Plaza, Rydges, Pullman Hotel, all the classy joints but not our little budget Barclays. This kids jump into bed, while Kris and I wrap presents for round 2 of Xmas day tomorrow.