Spaceship – the swiss army knife of campers. So proclaimed the orange writing on the side of “Red Dwarf”, our home for 10 days when we arrived in Auckland.
Despite the fact that the previous place that we’d rested our heads had separate dressing areas and sinks for each of us as well as a wraparound view of the jungle, we were still pretty excited to pick up our reclaimed Toyota Avensis, turned Spaceship and point it towards our home for the night, a campsite north of the city.
Rugby fever already had the country well in its grip by the time we arrived towards the end of the pool games and there were supporters in all manner of shirts proclaiming their support for one of the countries, all still in the running at that stage. Nearly everyone, no matter where they were from wanted to stop and chat and find out how long you were in the country for and which games you were going to – I say nearly everyone because we managed to find a couple of Scots that really didn’t want to talk to us no matter how many polite questions we asked them about their trip. I was willing to try and be friendly, but after being summarily ignored I was even more delighted when we sent their team packing 🙂
The whole camping experience was pretty great to be honest. NZ’s campsites are incredibly well set up with great facilities, which is just as well, as I didn’t really fancy having to cook dinner on the two ring gas stove hanging out the side of our little car. We did suffer from a little camper envy though when we traveled for a couple of days with new friends Dean and Lorna who had a camper where you didn’t have to put the bed away to drive it around. Imagine the luxury!
The whole camping experience is obviously much more sociable than staying in hotels and by the second day we’d already got drunk with a couple of Vancouverites, met a tonne of English, French and South Africans and secured new friends to share a full day pub crawl to the England v Scotland game with – result! We’d also discovered the wonders of the extra foot of space that you get if you open the Spaceship boot a little and put it’s little rear tent up – a whole foot!
boltsintotheblue 