Breakdown, Mt. Manganui, East Cape and Napier

We finally made it to Thames by the skin of our teeth and camped in a beautiful valley campground outside of town. They had bikes for free and we rode around on the beach and down into the town to watch the Wellington sevens tournament in a bar. The couple of days we spent there were mostly recovering from the epic van experience but nevertheless we decided to brave the drive across from Thames to the East Coast. Everything went more or less as before with the van but we had some kind of serious lapse in judgement and decided to just push through to Whakatane. We got SO CLOSE but as we were going up a hill to get on the expressway outside of Tauranga the van had a final tantrum and died. We tried to start it. We tried again. Nothing. We put on sunscreen, ate all the remaining fruit in our cooler, and called AA, New Zealand's version of the AAA but its members bear a certain resemblance to what you might think of in the American version.

Our Rupert-enforced rest stop outside Mt. Manganui

A brief hour later a truck pulls up and out leaps Roger in his fashionable lime-green reflector vest. He tears open our front seat and between questions about Obama and Minnesota (the only state he hasn't been to, apparently) begins to jab screwdrivers into our engine. He pokes around and periodically tells Margaret to turn the key or not turn the key while he generates a lot of sparks. In the end he calls us a tow truck and tells us not to worry because he's told the guy to tow us to a car park that is near a pub and a liquor store. We are no longer worried. It turns out we stalled out on the very last hill before we could have gone cruising down into the resort hotspot and surfing capital of New Zealand, Mt. Manganui.

Not such a bad place to be 'trapped'

The car park turns out to be a campground swarming with hordes of shrieking children a mere 5 km from the town itself. We set off down the blazing sidewalk and made it not five minutes when we were surprised by a cheerful honk. I guess Roger must live in the neighborhood, because he picked us up and took us to town, inquiring thoughtfully about the 40 minutes we had been apart.
The episode with our attentive rescuer Roger and his screwdriver technique inspired us to finally name the van. Previously we had thought about naming it Rupert, but after the breakdown we decided that Rupert was a whiny hypochondriac with serious asthma and our fixed up van needed a new name to match its new ability to actually drive us places. So we named it Roger Sparks and we have decided that Rupert is now a kind of derisive insult like "stop being rupertish" or "you're ruperting". Roger Sparks is a very flamboyant German or Eastern european van. Possibly a body builder with a strong maternal instinct.

Anyway, turns out Mt. Manganui is a little...boring. Like Santa Cruz with no hippies. Everything closes by about 7:30 (a disturbing pattern in New Zealand in general) and the only people who really talk to you are overly friendly and sunburnt men named Brett. There was a large gathering of people all watching a game which can only be described as "lie down in the sand and then run towards a stick while wearing a speedo and cap." Fortunately the car was cheap and easy to fix and we were on the road after the long weekend.
Our route took us around the East cape towards Gisbourne on a twisty mountain highway lined with pohutukawa trees and dead possums. There are no big towns on the way, just tiny, predominantly Maori villages and endless empty beaches. Margarett collected enough shells that she has to ship them home to her mother for safekeeping because we ran out of room in the van.

Now we're in Napier, we've had too much coffee and we need another glass of wine. We're going to go get Art Decoed. You figure it out.