February 18 – 19, 2014
It felt great to wake up to a warm, summery morning in Tauranga. During one of my night watches on the passage from Great Mercury Island, I’d made a list of all the places we looked forward to seeing again, along with a few we hoped to visit. Now, we were here, everything on my list waiting for us. We were home, or at least what felt like home to us here in New Zealand.
This feeling was reinforced when we went to the marina office and retrieved some mail that had been waiting for us. Here, we found our New Zealand driver’s licenses and our visa extensions! All good stuff, but we were most excited about the licenses, symbols that we are now part of this country, that we belong here even if we do still require visas.
Now all we needed to do was retrieve our car from the Bayswater Marina in Auckland, then we’d really feel at home! We booked a bus for early the next morning. Meanwhile we washed and scrubbed the boat and dinghy, rinsed out our foulies, and pickled our watermaker. At the end of the day when everything had dried, we rolled up the dinghy and stashed it and put our foul weather gear away. It felt strange to stash all this stuff knowing we wouldn’t be seeing it again for months, but we looked forward to our road-travel adventures ahead.
The next morning we got up early to catch the bus to Auckland. It was a long ride in drizzly conditions and a relief to finally get off the bus. While enjoying lunch at a favorite spot downtown, Rich asked, “Now why did we leave Auckland?” It was pretty amusing considering how anxious he’d been to get to Tauranga a few weeks ago. But it was also a good thing: it meant he’d bonded with Auckland and we had yet another place in New Zealand we could call home.
After lunch we caught a ferry to Bayswater Marina and retrieved our car. Now, it was time for the nearly 3-hour drive back to Tauranga. We didn’t mind—we were happy to have our car back, and excited to begin a new phase of our lives.
Below, a few photos of (or from) the Tauranga Bridge Marina, mostly evening photos taken over the period of time we were there in 2014 (click to enlarge any photo). –Cyndi
