A Great Adventure for Bob and Naomi

Hello. It is still Saturday March 24 at 7:45pm even after a 9 hr flight from NZ to Hawaii. Hawaiian Air is another fantastic airline for their in-flight service. We got 2 meals with beverages and free movie service on their screens. Plus Naomi booked our seats in "Extra Comfort" zone.  It had extra leg room and was at a spot in the plane where there was only 2 seats, ours , side by side. This blog is again playing catchup. We traveled to the glowworm caves on Thursday, March 22 at Waitomo from Taupo, it was a 2 hr trip one way and the weather was a mix of sun and cloud but no rain at that point. We arrived early for our planned 1230 start and went through the safety briefing and got into our caving gear. In Canada we sometimes call caving Spelunking, but don't ask me why and I asked one of the guides if they knew the word and I kinda got a blank look so caving it is! Naomi does have a "reluctance" for tight spaces and there were a few of those down...

Hello again. We are writing about our days a little late as if we had just done it because we are already in Hawaii but behind in letting you know about ours days. Now it is 6:40pm at Auckland Airport. Another 2.5hrs and we can check in and wait another 3 hrs. Hopefully we can sleep on the flight to Hawaii. So we have left the volcanos behind and now are travelling through rural farmland and see this in the distance: We were sure that NZ was nuclear free, turns out that this a cooling tower for geothermal activity We also saw again huge hedges stretching across the fields. The trees appeared to be pine trees. Further down the road we saw these hilltops covered in trees surrounded by bare slopes (kinda looked like a bad haircut). Once we got closer we could see that the bare slopes had been replanted at different stages. I asked the guys at the soaring club the next day about the logging and they said that the pine tree was not native to NZ but was introduced to meet th...