After our quick visit to Canada, which concluded with a night in Montreal, it was back to the US of A. We jumped on a Greyhound bus, fortunately (as we were fully loaded with our bags) the bus station was a short walk from the hotel. The Greyhound would take us over the boarder, to Burlinton, Vermont… the nearest place to Montreal in America that we could find affordable car rental!
Having spend the night into a motel on the cusp of Silicon Valley, we felt suitably acclimatised to our urban surroundings. Comfortable enough to ride the peaks and troughs of undulating San Francisco. We rocked up at our next pit stop early, another motel nestled in the heart of Broadway, keen to spend as much of the day exploring the new neighbourhood.
We awoke metres from the Grand Canyon… well probably a couple hundred. Lets settle on pretty close.
We headed off from our campsite in Matata and beelined to the destination for the day, Hobbiton. Remnants of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, the set of the Tolkien inspired Hobbit village, sat a couple of hours drive from our coastal starting point.
On arriving in Auckland we quickly set about washing / drying all of our clothes in our room’s combo washer dryer… with mixed success… regardless we headed into Auckland for a look around! After a good nights sleep, we engaged our automatic Mitsubishi Lancer into drive mode and headed North to Stony bay, a campsite near the tip of the Coromandel peninsula (full route map can be found at the bottom of the page / or you can follow this link!).