10.1.20 Chillen in Orewa Beach

The sunrise is beautiful and I am standing on the beach in my pajamas with my camera at 6.45am.

Since relaxing is on today's agenda, I sit comfortably in the open tailgate with coffee and yogurt and listen to the sea, because not many people are up yet.

When the showers are cleaned at 10.30 am, I leave and get ready to leave for a 2.5-hour village and beach walk at 11.30 am. I check if the BP gas station refills gas bottles - it doesn't. Here I can only exchange the whole bottle for $39, which is about 26 euros. Considering that I maybe cooked something in the pan or heated something up in the evening about 12-15 times, and I only needed the kettle 2 or 3 times when I wasn't connected to electricity and couldn't use the electric kettle, exchanging a bottle seems a bit much to me. Since fewer and fewer gas stations want to refill, it will come down to a gas station about 8km away in a place called Dairy Flat, which actually still refills. First, I walk along the promenade and a little through the two and a half streets of Orewa.

Most of them are just cafes or restaurants, bakeries with standard colorful cakes, pies, and soft bread.

I walk down to the beach, which is even wider at low tide. At the end of the bay, a rugged cliff rises, while in the tide pools below, snails, crabs, and mussels wait for the tide.

The southwest wind is still there and I walk half of the way with a fleece jacket. I find two sand dollar skeletons, but they are already broken by the time I get back to the camper 😭.

Now the work begins: packing my suitcase. Since on Sunday I'll bring clothes and my fleece blanket to someone in Auckland to donate to a charitable institution, I don't have as much as I did on the way here. Even towels, tea towels, dish brushes, etc. will be thrown away on Sunday. For space reasons, I have to pack in front of the camper again and in the end, I only have just under 17kg including the 3.2kg that the bag weighs when empty.

I still need sandals, flip-flops, the shorts, and the polo shirt from today, but I'm relaxed about it. Because from Frankfurt to Berlin I'm flying on a separate ticket and only have 23kg of baggage allowance. Immediately I google the nearest shopping center 🤣. No, I grab my half-torn beach chair, on which I can only sit crookedly, my iPod, and sit on the beach at 4 pm. Considering that the weekend is just around the corner, there still aren't many people on the beach!

After an hour, it's so cold that I escape. In the evening, I drive to the gas station in Dairy Flat. The gas bottle has to be removed and weighed. The thing is so tightly screwed that I need a wrench from the gas station - just to find out that the bottle is still so full after 3.5 weeks that I can't refill anything. So I screw the thing back on and return to Orewa. By now, an Indian extended family has "moved in" next to me, set up 2 picnic tables/benches, and fired up the grill just 50cm beside my rear window.

I also cook something in the pan. Everything that has to go - about 12g of bell pepper, 1 cherry tomato, a quarter can of corn, and some peas, as well as half a carrot and a bit of cream cheese. Some potato salad fresh from the delicatessen counter of the large Countdown supermarket and mix everything well 🤣🤣. It's pretty cold outside. Wash up and then observe if people are still checking into the Rotel Tours bus today. Traveling like being in a can. I take a photo through the window into one of these compartments - compared to that, every capsule hotel in Tokyo is a suite.

I would never ever go on vacation like that. Apparently, they travel more by bus here, while the cabin trailers are waiting somewhere. The thing is also so big that you can only drive on a few streets here. So. I have to wash up 😭