Our last weekend in New Zealand was packed with great day trips and birthday celebrations. My dad, Rob and I took a short ferry trip to Rangitoto, a volcanic island in the Hauraki Gulf.
Rangitoto appeared out of the sea after a series of erutions about 600 years ago. It must have been a shock for the Mauri people living on adjoining Motutapu island! The lower slopes are still bare lava rock, so our picnic spot was quite uncomfortable!
The view from the summit was amazing - you can see right across to the city and, on the other side, as far as the Coromandel Peninsular. There are some lava caves at the top of the island, which were formed by a crust of lava cooling and the hot lava inside flowing out to leave a hollow.
Another day, another island... for my birthday day out we all went to beautiful Waiheke, yet another little gem just a short hop from Auckland.
We visited Mudbrick, a fantastically located restaurant with amazing gardens and spectacular views across to Rangitoto.
It was lovely to spend my birthday with Mum and Dad. Last year we celebrated with our adopted family and friends in Panama and, as enjoyable as that was, I did miss having them around.
We also had one last catch up/ goodbye/ birthday celebration with our Auckland friends. Coffee with Kandace on my birthday and a night out with (below) Mark, Jen and Mark's brother, Phil, in Ponsonby. We were very sad to leave them all but all promised to stay in touch and hope to meet up again somewhere in the world!
Then the really tough farewells. We flew out from Auckland at 1am on 10th November so, late on my birthday, after a delicious meal, we all left for the airport. It was very hard to leave Mum and Dad behind, knowing I wouldn't see them again for another year, so there were lots of tears. On the other hand, they've created a great life for themselves in New Zealand, with a much more relaxed pace, lots of nice friends and more fantastic places to visit.
The journey back was quite enjoyable. It was very long (10hrs to Singapore, where we had a shower to refresh ourselves for the second leg, then 14hrs back to London) but we had amazing views some of the way, like this one over the mountains of Afghanistan.
As you would expect for mid November, the weather was very miserable when we landed at Heathrow. The palette of turquoise, blue and green of our last few days in NZ was gone and in its place was... well, grey, really!
We've now been back for about 2 weeks and are settling back into UK life. I've been getting some days of supply teaching work while Rob gets on with the serious business of job searching. It looks like we'll be based somewhere down south and we'll certainly be in the UK for a good while now, but don't worry, we won't stop exploring our amazing planet just yet!
Rachel x