Touring Coromandel

We're poking around the Coromandel Peninsula for the next couple days. All the countryside is amazingly beautiful. The roads are wind-y-er than one could ever imagine. Paradise for a sportscar driver or sportbike rider! My arms are actually tired after a few hours of driving! Yesterday we went to the Waiau Waterworks, and had fun interacting with all sorts of water-powered contraptions. In the evening we went to a beach where geothermally heated water percolates up thru the sand at low tide. There were hundreds of other people frantically making dams and digging small pools to sit in - quite an entertaining sight! Today we're at Mt. Maunganui, where Grandma Lou remembered finding lots of nice shells on the beach 12 years ago. Sure enough, there are literally piles of some sort of large winkle shells... we've got a whole grocery bag full of them!

The van seems to be working fine now, no more leaking diesel, which is a very good thing. We tried letting the other car (the grandparents and two Austrian friends) lead on the way here, but it seems that every third car is a white, nondescript Toyota Corolla sedan. We got separated for about an hour, but found each other on the beach. We may have to invest some $$ in the van's sound system. There are no radio stations in range, we've only got a tape deck (and no tapes), and the kids endlessly repeating 4 second sound bites from their favorite song or movie is driving us batty... funny how we'd thought all being together in a 44ft boat was a small space!

I think we'll have to go for icecream after lunch - it's hot today (for the first time since we arrived in NZ).

-Pete