Whitianga - with an F!

We found out that when a place name in NZ starts with the letters Wh, you drop those letters and replace them with an F, so, here we are tonight in Fitianga (or Fiddy, as its known in these parts!! 😳). Long driving day today, we left rainy Paihia around 8am and the drive south to Auckland was awesome - we even saw some sun! Just south of Auckland, we hit road construction so that was slow going, then after about 3.5 hours, turned onto state highway 25 (a very winding, hilly road) to take us out to the Coromandel Peninsula and this lovely, but very rainy today, little town, arriving around 2pm.

We had booked a nice 1 bedroom suite for the last 6 nights of our trip, and it’s really lovely. After checking in, we went for a walk around town to check out if anything was going to be open for a Christmas Dinner. There are only 2 places open, and as in England, Christmas dinner is at lunchtime, with the last sitting of a set menu being at 2pm. The first place was asking $149 per person, (no drinks included), and still had space available (wonder why!), and the second was only $80 per person, but was fully booked! So we decided we would do our own Christmas dinner and headed off the the Countdown grocery store (interestingly a Woolworths owned venture, and very big in both Australia and NZ), and stocked up on supplies for breakfast and dinner for the 25th. Came back to unpack groceries and our suitcases then went out for another walk before going for an awesome dinner at Frankies Sports Bar!

Wifi at this place is spotty, no modem in the apartment, but an antenna attached to the stairs outside (😳) so Dave has been going on the outside deck to download and send me photos for today’s entry! The rain is supposed to stick around for the next couple of days, so I guess we’ll be doing lots of reading and relaxing, which is actually not a bad thing considering our schedule of the past six weeks! Not too many photos today, but hopefully more when the weather clears! 😊Les mer