OK, we’re officially lucky. The forecast called for rain for the past two days, and we haven't gotten wet once. We've driven through rain multiple times, but every time we stopped, we had either overcast or downright sunny skies.
Went to the Auckland botanical garden on our drive down from Baylys Beach to Waitomo. Surprisingly, after 30 minutes there Karine was heard saying: "maybe I'm done with botanical gardens" then we met more flowers and, to our astonishment, a lot of bees and bumble bees busily harvesting pollen from those flowers, and Karine was no longer done with botanical gardens. All is right with the world and hell has not frozen over.
In our adventure, we've also stopped at Muriwai Gannet Colony. Thanks to the wonder of the internet and having Marie-Pierre has a friend we learned that there are three species of Gannet (in French: fou de bassan). They are so close that they are sometimes just referred to as Gannet but really there's the Northen Gannet (the one we, North Americans, know), Australian Gannet (likely the one we saw today) and, for the geographically challenged ornithologist, the cliff gannet (all 3 like cliffs but I guess the person who found the third species of gannet flunked map reading 101 and went for something original).
