Maori word of the day: Kia Ora – Hello / Good Luck. Maori language is still spoken by the Maori minority here in NZ. Many towns and locations have names in Maori too. As a greeting, Kia Ora has become very popular even with non-Maoris.
The service was great so far. They picked us up at the hotel, took us to their office, and walked me through all the procedures. The RV is almost new, just 26,000km and is very well organized and thought through on the human interface side. However, it is small. And we have tons of stuff. How do we fit everything in? Where to put Orr and Shir’s double stroller? And all the clothes?
The toilet and shower are so cramped that when you take a seat you need to fold up the washbasin. The shower floor is where you stand when washing your hands or using the toilet, which means a muddy mess most of the time. On the other hand, the motorhome floor is fully carpeted and comes with a mini vacuum cleaner.
The car is manual gear but as it is relatively small, it pulled up hills quite well today. The windows open manually but on the other hand I have a video camera mounted on the back of the RV with a small screen for viewing when I shift to reverse gear. There is a flat screen TV and DVD player as well as wine glasses, but the pin holding the refrigerator door is one of the most poorly designed human interfaces I have ever seen. We asked for two spare pins before we left the depot.
I’m sure that in the next few days we will discover delights as well as frights with the RV. I hope we can learn to cope with them all.
We drove a few km from the depot to Pack n’ Save, a supermarket that reminded us a bit of Costco, from a warehouse perspective, but with smaller packages. After stocking up on essentials we had a quick lunch in the parking lot and were off.
Our drive was relatively short, and we arrived at Waiwera just after 4pm. Everyone fell asleep on the way. We got a great site, literally on the water with a view of a small island several hundred meters away. I tried to woo the kids outside to play while Paola unpacked and tried to fit all our stuff into the storage compartments, but they preferred to sit inside and watch a movie on the new TV.
It was a difficult logistical task, but we managed to fit almost everything into somewhere. But very tightly. I hope we will be able to find all the stuff we jammed in the nooks and crannies without too much trouble.