Sunday May 23^rd

After leaving Wellington, we took a bus back to Taupo where we stayed four nights with the couch surfing family we had previously stayed with. They were absolutely wonderful yet again! We were really able to relax at their house while outside it persisted to rain….every single day…One of those days, we braved the rain and explored the town. Another day, Erin, one of the daughters of the family, took us around town and to a really cool place where they keep honeybees and make many different kinds of honey. Otherwise, we mostly spent our days hanging at their house.

We left Taupo on the 27^th and bused back to Auckland. Erin drove us to the bus station and when we came around the hill they live on we could see Mt. Ruapahu and Mount Doom on the other side of the lake and they were snow capped. It was beautiful! When we arrived in Auckland we headed over to our hostel, which was our last “home” in New Zealand. Our last few days in Auckland were mostly rain filled, but we were able to walk downtown and we spent about a day and a half there reading. We had run out of our own books to read, so we each picked up a book we’ve been wanting to read, and sat in the café and finished the books there cuz there was no way we were going to pay for the overpriced books!

Also, side note…which is actually more than a side note, more like the most random thing ever. As we were walking towards downtown from the hostel, we had to walk uphill over a bridge. When we were coming up to the bridge we looked up to see a tire/wheel rolling down the road all on its own…it took a moment to register what was happening. A tire was rolling down hill and picked up speed as it flew past us and continued on all the way down the hill! Once it reached the bottom of the hill as oncoming traffic was swerving out of the way, the tire hit the curb and bounced up 15-20 ft in the air!!...not even exaggerating!! It went impossibly high and landed and kept going until it slammed into a car, set off the car alarm, and came to a stop…it was the weirdest, most random, most ‘pause for a moment to see if what happened really happened’ thing I think I have ever seen! As we stood there dumbfounded, a couple of people stopped their cars to ask us where the tire came from. We were just glad someone else saw it because it confirmed we weren’t hallucinating.

After a while, we decided to keep going up over the bridge and we just pondered and wondered how it could have happened. As we talked, we played out different scenarios and couldn’t come up with something that made sense. Then as we turned the corner after the bridge the pieces started fitting together. We saw an SUV pulled over on the side of the road, and behind the SUV was a boat on a trailer, a trailer that just so happened to be missing an ENTIRE WHEEL!! We suddenly saw a man walking towards the SUV with something that looked like a jack. So we waited for him and asked tentatively, “Did you happen to lose a wheel?” “Yeah…did you see it?” he said. “Well, yeah, we saw it rolling all the way down the hill over there and we think it hit a car and stopped down at the bottom…” His face was a mix of relief and anxiety. We felt sorry for the guy and for person whose car was pummeled by a renegade tire.