The "Day of the Scenic Route"...and more

It's the day you've all been waiting for...our trip from the male perspective! I apparently am charged with catching you up on the past 3 days. Sunday shall forever be dubbed the "Day of the Scenic Route", but it started with a straight shot drive from Orewa back into Auckland. There we shared a wonderful lunch with Sir Wilson Whineray and his lovely wife Beth. Sir Wilson is one of the most famous rugby players in all of NZ, having captained the All Blacks for several years. It was quite an enjoyable experience with a couple of extremely friendly hosts.

From there, we set out for Rotorua, with hopes of stopping by the Hot Water Beaches of Coromandel. That's when the "scenic" route kicked in. Instead of heading straight across the Coromandel Peninsula to the Hot Water Beaches, we missed the turn off and, with a large mountain range running down the middle like a backbone, we found ourselves circling the entirety of the peninsula. Best mistake we've made thus far! The views were amazing!



With a time constraint on when we needed to check into our hostel in Rotorua, we had to skip the Hot Water Beach, and another "scenic" route on our way into the city made it close, but everything worked out in the end.
We started the next day with a new challenge: ZORBING!

That's Kelly

That's me. 

All around good experience!

Of course that wasn't enough so we tried jet boating, flying up and down the Huka River at high rates of speed, dodging rocks and trees by mere inches (not to mention pulling several 360 degree spins)! Eventually we ended up at Huka Falls, which is amazing in and of itself!

That brings us to today, when we made a morning trip to Wai-O-Tapu, one of Rotorua's many geothermal hot spots. We started the tour with Lady Knox:

We then made the 3 km hike around the rest of the park, which featured craters and many other-worldly colored rocks and boiling pools.

This afternoon, we boarded the Barbary sailboat and headed out on Lake Taupo, the largest lake in NZ, comparable to the size of Tahoe.

The boat tour took us to some fascinating rock carvings

So there is my contribution to the blog. Please comment and say that you like Kelly's posts better so that she won't be silly enough again to suggest that I write a post!

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Location:The Coromandel Peninsula, Rotorua and Taupo