Found it...

Because Jesus decided to rise fron the grave like a zombie, I got 4 days off from school. Thank you Jesus. This past weekend and a couple days before, i went on a roadtrip with 7 other people down and around the north island. Let me preface this trip by explaining to you that the car we rode in was, to say the least, a pile of crap. It was a super old "Town Ace" the kind where you can put the seats down in the back and make a bed, and the engine is underneath the driver and passenger seats so to change the oil (which we had to do every 50km) the entire front section of the car lifted up to reveal the engine, it was amazing really. Only 2 people knew how to drive The Beast because it was a manual, whatever, fine with me. So we left at 4pm on thursday. It was Myself, Summer, Josh, Matt, Mike, Alex, Star and Jessi and all of our crap; backpacks, sleeping bags, tents, food, hiking shoes, and the like. The Beast was no longer hungry, this car was full. So we left Railway and got on rte. 2 towards Gisborn (pronounced gis-bin) where Alex had a camp friend and with whom we'd be staying with for a night, but that was 7 hours south. So we drove and drove and it was pissing down rain; lets flash back to my cross country trip, remember the rain? In that situation i trusted the driver and the car, not the elements, in this situation did not trust the car or the elements, but Josh was an excelent driver and we got through it with only a little water on our shoulders (The Beast leaked). It stopped eventually so after about 4 hours of driving we decided to stop and set up camp in Whakatene on the coast. We had 3 tents and 8 people, Josh slept in the van and I slept in a tent with Summer, Star and Matt slept in a tent and Alex and Jessi slept in a tent and Mike wanted to sleep outside...until it began to rain. Hard. It was so loud in the tent because the rain flap was doing just that, it was flapping around like crazy, needless to say there was no sleeping. In the morning i stretched out my legs right into the puddle of rainwater that had moved into the bottom of my sleeping bag, it was great. We all awoke eventually and packed up in the pouring rain and headed to Gisborn. The drive to Gisborn was amazing, we were driving through this gorge for about 2 hours, it was so green and wet from the rain but just beautiful, kind of Jurassic park-like, but no dinosaurs. There was a river rushing about below us and blue sky (eventually) above us and just a mass of green in the middle. It was nice to see nature after being in the city for such a long time. We stopped at this burger joint called Captain Morgans; Lonely Planet travel guide said that the bugers were "particularly large and partucularly good" well they were neither, but we got a kick out of it anyway. We got to Alex's camp friends house and hung our wet camping stuff in his back yard because by this time it was a beautiful sunny day. Star, matt, josh and mike decided to go sleep on the beach but the rest of us liked the idea of a warm dry house, so we'd meet for breakfast in the morning. Gisborn is a great town, it reminds me a lot of Province town with a little Stars Hollow mixed in (thats a gilmore girls reference, sorry) SO we got breakfast intown at this place called Robert Harris Cafe then headed back to Joel's house (the camp friend) to pack up and head to Napier. It was a beautiful day so we stopped for some wine tastings at local vineyards, i bought a bottle of Gewurztraminer white wine, delicious. It got to be about 3pm so we decided to head out. The day was perfect though, good food, good people, good wine, good landscape, good weather, i was a happy girl. We drove for a long while through, once again, novel inspiring landscape, up over mountains, down into valleys, around lakes and through corn fields and grape fields. It was getting pretty late so we decided to camp before we got to Napier. We set up camp on the beach, it was an amazingly clear night with more stars that ive ever seen (even in Hawaii) and the moon was the size of a tea cake(thats big, really big), it was a great night even though we couldnt get a fire lit. The next day we woke and drove about an hour to Napier. Napier is the town that was completely devoured by a 1931 earthquake and has since been rebuilt completely art deco. The cafe's outnumber takeaways but there is a Macdonalds which is very MacDeco. The city is an art deco homage to zigzags, bubbling fountains and endless neon lit clocktowers. We got breakfast at this cafe called Ujazi, all local art filled with comfortable chairs and tables and amazing food. Matt had to be back at the railway by 7 so we headed home around 10am stopping in Taupo to see the famous Lake Taupo, the largest lake in the southern hemesphere. A place devoted to fishing and extreme sports and adventure activities, we just got lunch in the town square. The drive back was very sleepy, but beautiful when i was awake. I was happy this whole weekend, i didnt have a care in the world (except when the car made funny noises) I was with good people who made eachother laugh the whole time. I was in a classic car which only added to the roadtrip aspect. I was driving through some of the most glorious and natural beauty ive ever seen. I saw stars and the moon from a different angle (you cant see the man on the moon from thie side of the earth). There was one point in the trip where we were driving through some farmland and there were rolling hills and cows and sheep and we were all singing at the top of our lungs and i couldnt help but stop and smile, i'd found it. I'd found the happy home feeling ive been looking for.

my camera got low on batteries half way through so i will post more pictures from other peoples cameras once I get them.

Easter roadtrip part 1