Bucket List - check!

Are you allowed to add things to your bucket list, do them and then check them off? Riding a motorcycle for miles on an NZ beach just wasn't on my bucket list radar, but I have to say it was a pretty memorable experience.

Wayne and I set off yesterday morning in order to hit low tide on a west coast beach outside of Auckland. We got stuck in the soft (deep!) sand on our way to the beach, had to offload the bikes and have someone tow us to the hard-packed sand 100m in front of us. Waves are very big and the sand is black in this part of NZ-beachland. The Piano was filmed just south of where we were. Beachgoers unload their 'toys' at the access point, and we saw surfers, dune buggies, 4x4s, kite surfers, "blow-carts" (an NZ invention), horseback riders and dirt bikes like ours. After what seemed like WAY too short a lesson, I was tentatively teetering down the beach in first gear. I got the hang of shifting pretty quickly but Wayne told me that "bikes aren't meant to go in a straight line" so then I had a whole new set of skills to worry about! Despite the weaving practice, I preferred going really fast in a straight line, with nothing to worry about but the odd piece of driftwood or a speedbump jellyfish. This beach is actually classified as an NZ highway and speeds are posted (60 km).

When we got back to the car, Wayne drove it through and I muscled my way on my bike through the deep sand alleyway to the parking area - the beer waiting in the cooler never tasted so good!

Auckland Zoo

Auckland lifestyle

Fifteen hundred residents a day travel by ferry to Auckland from Waiheke Island. Not a bad commute as commutes go.

You can't walk more than 20 feet in any direction without stumbling across a cafe, and the choice of coffees is astounding. I'm partial to latte with a triple shot of expresso, but I pay $5.60 for one of those babies. Starbucks has cracked the scene here but I haven't seen a Tim's anywhere around.

I was so appreciating the NZ countryside the other day as I labored up one of the 53 volcanoes that surround Auckland, not so much for the views, but for the ability to walk through knee-high grass without the slightest possibility of stepping on or near a snake. You gotta like a country with no snakes! Or anything else that can kill you for that matter, except maybe for the bus drivers. I rode with one yesterday who seemed intent on running down a cyclist and almost took off a young woman's nose who was standing too close to the bus lane - and she didn't have a big nose.

You know you're in NZ when...

Hills are actually old volcanoes (or new!), cell phones are mobiles, coffees are ordered flat white or short black, cottages are called bachs (don't ask me...), public school kids all wear uniforms, which are evidently designed by people who hate children or who are victims of 'ugly-uniform syndrome' themselves, and my name is Keerthy.

Beautiful beach day today on an island just outside of Auckland harbor called Waiheke. More vineyards than you can count and beautiful beaches, although a recent cyclone flung thousands of horse mussels onto the beach. They've had to cancel the annual horse races which were to be run next week because of the piles of these 6-inch-long bivalves.

Tomorrow I'm sampling Zumba, NZ-style and Sun. it's dirt-biking on the beach. Help!

Cheers - Kath

Toronto to San Francisco to Auckland

Flight at 8 am, up at 4:30 to enter the Pearson Airport vortex - daring to shave 30 minutes off the required 3 hr. check-in window.
Despite the numbers of people waiting in various chutes, early morning flights tend to be quieter. Bored kids and fretful babies haven't worked themselves into 'states' and sleepy adults tend to murmer and shuffle. I've negotiated the Air Canada line and successfully avoided the dreaded automated kiosk as an AC greeter waves me through to a real person. I thanked him and said how much I hated those blinking machines that never seem to have my info contained in their bits and bytes. He volunteered that he'd pay $25 each to have them all removed; I told him I'd chip in.

I'm in the U.S. customs line now with a pudgy Dutch couple in front of me. Watching the man unsuccessfully engage two little kids in conversation, I missed the woman's 300 lb. bag toppling over until the hard plastic handle made contact with my thigh. ("Ow!! That hurt!") I guessed that she wasn't a physics prof when she hung her 200 lb. carry-on off the back of said suitcase. "Ever hear of gravity, Edith??" (I read the ID tag on her bag and knew exactly who I was dealing with). She apologized and I rather ingraciously grimaced a clenched-teeth "That's OK."

I had a 7-hour layover in San Francisco, so I hopped a train downtown and walked all over the waterfront in anticipation of my upcoming 13-hour flight to Auckland. If I lost the use of my limbs in transit I wanted to remember what tired feet felt like.