Start Your Engines....

    11/17/13

    Today was our day off, so we woke up at 6:30 A.M. and headed in to Auckland for the weekly car fair in hopes of finding ourselves a ride to take us across the country and back again.  We found several that looked promising, and we even took one Volvo that we thought was particularly good in to a service station to get it checked out.  The check cost us $150, and it turned out that basically the entire car was a disaster.  All of the oil was leaking out of the car at an alarming rate, the battery was shot, it required a full servicing...the list of problems went on and on.  I guess that's kind of to be expected when you're looking for a car at around 2,000 bucks, eh?  So back to square one we went.  We had a look at basically every car in the place, and ultimately we settled on a 1996 Honda Orthia station wagon, which we took back in to the servicing place to see if it checked out.  We had much better luck this time, as it turned out the Honda only needed an oil change, a new oil filter, and some new wiper blades.  So we bought it, went directly to an auto parts store, got everything we needed, and came back to the farm to change the oil and give it a good wash.  It's nothing too special, but we're really happy with it given the low price and our confidence that it will last us the whole trip without any major problems.  Also, my two favorite features on the car that I think are worth noting: it has a custom radio already installed, so we can hook up our iPods to play music directly through the car, and it's purple (go Frogs).  Oh, and one other thing...we thought Orthia was a really stupid name for a car, so we de-badged it, chopped up the letters, and re-badged it as Thor.  'Merica!
    We had a little 23rd birthday celebration tonight here on the farm, which was really awesome.  Michelle baked me a double chocolate birthday cake, which was delicious, and we had a really great dinner consisting of steaks, sausages, salad, fresh vegetables, corn on the cob, and Mac's Gold lager.  It's tough to imagine a better place to spend a birthday than in the heart of New Zealand.  We start work again tomorrow morning, likely cutting some trees down by the lake that are getting a little too big, and then collecting them into a huge wood pile for burning, which will (hopefully) go up some time in the next few days before we leave.  We're headed out of Waikato this Wednesday, and we feel like the sky's truly the limit now that we've got wheels.  We're still planning on heading down to Raglan, surf nation in New Zealand, to catch some waves and hopefully not fall on our faces too much, but I'll keep you guys updated as things progress.

Still rockin' the Horned Frog colors on the other side of the world (and not at all upset that we've been missing these football games),
Jack