We couldn't escape the rain forever

When we woke up this morning the sun was shining and all was beautiful and calm on our campsite. Apart from Nick seeing a whole family of German people urinate in the forest rather than the toilets 50m away that is. Even their young children were encouraged to do it. Why oh why I have no idea. The site even had 3 toilet blocks and with only 5 vehicles there it wasn't as if they wouldn't be able to find a free one. Apart from that we had a beautiful morning walking down to the beach from the campsite. Our first white sand beach in New Zealand and it was really something. We had lovely blue sky out in front of us when we looked out to sea but behind us was the darkest of clouds looming as almost a reminder that there must be some truth to the weather man's 3 day rain prediction. It was a little entertaining to see a man "walking" his dogs along the beach. I say "walking" because the dogs were walking/running behind the guy who was sat in his car driving up and down the full length of the beach. I guess it makes taking them for a walk a lot quicker! We began to head south from the campsite and as promised we eventually entered the rain. It really did decide to chuck it down and we made the decision to miss the Bay of Islands. Most of the things to do there involve lookouts and walks, both of which are no fun in the rain so it felt we'd be hanging around for a couple of days waiting for it to pass. Instead we aimed to end our day in Whangerei which is the most major city in Northland and about half way down to Auckland. We chose to make a pit stop at Rainbow Falls in Waipapa and it was here that we got our first insight into how much it has rained here. As we were looking at the crazy amount of water being propelled down over the falls Nick got talking to a guy who was there and he showed him a photo of the falls two days earlier where there was only a few trickles of water flowing down in comparison. It really put into perspective how much rain this area had experienced over the past two days and I'm rather pleased we managed to avoid the most of it. As we drove even further south the weather got increasingly worse and we came across our first flooded road on the highway down. We were avoiding highway 1 because it was closed due to a metre of flood water but even on our alternative highway we experienced some flooding. Most of the paddocks and surrounding lands now had lovely lakes and ponds and you couldn't help but feel sorry for the drenched cows and sheep. Although they seemed quite content still munching away on grass. Also as we kept driving I started to get a headache coming on, probably from being in the van too long. By the time we reached Whangarei it was getting quite bad. We had a quick look in a second hand shop for some clothes before checking in to a Top10 holiday park. By this point it was awful and I didn't want to do anything. Because of this we were naughty and ordered pizza to be delivered to the van and it was such a good decision! After food and lots of water and pills I started to feel a little more human and we did manage to make use of the showers if none of the other facilities. Hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow and it will be totally gone. Either that or I've definitely reached the conclusion that I need a new head!Read more