Merry Christmas 🎁 🎄 🎅🏼

Merry Christmas to you all! We hope you had a blessed celebration with family and friends.
For us celebrating away from home and in summer was a bit strange, but we still had a lovely time.
We started to feel very christmasy when we visited Charly’s host family from her NZ stay 10 years ago. They were so warm and welcoming and being in a decorated living room with a tree got us in the mood.
When we left on the 24th it was raining hard when we made our way to our “luxury” camp site in coromandel. Since it’s very popular for people from Auckland we were lucky to have found a spot.
For our unorthodox Summer Christmas Dinner we had - drumroll please - a BBQ. Because what else would we do?
It was super yummy even though we had to defend it from the seagulls with life and limb. In the evening, Christmas Eve, we tried to set the mood with some music and our tiny Christmas tree. We went with the German tradition of opening presents in the evening.
The next day, real Christmas for the Kiwis, it was initially sunny but then rained all day. The atmosphere in the campground was quite jolly. Our finisher for the day was a relaxing soak in a hut tub in the dunes.
Today half the day was super rainy so we chilled in our van, also nice to do nothing. We also cleaned up a bit and packed our bags, since we have to return our Chubby van tomorrow. The last days of our journey have started.
The sun decided to make an appearance and we took the chance to visit the beautiful Hahei beach, which we can almost see from our camping spot. The water was really cold but we were brave and went for a dip.
Our last night here we took advantage of the facilities and enjoyed a yummy pizza with an aperol spritz.
Tomorrow we are making our way to Auckland.

Thank you for following our Journey this far, we are pretty behind with uploading but are determined to finish it, to ultimately turn this blog into a book. We will likely only finish it when we are already home but of course you wre most welcome to keep following the updates of what adventures we went on the past four months.

All the love and happy holidays,
Charly & Jeroen 🤶🏻 🎅🏼Les mer