The perfect last day

After saying goodbye to almost all my friends in Mount Manganui the day before, it was time for me to leave the next day. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to see everyone to say goodbye.

After checking out of the hostel, I was picked up and my last road trip took me to Auckland.

Once we arrived there, we dropped off David, after which Lisa and I headed to Mount Eden, where I could enjoy the view one last time.

After our little excursion, we picked up David again and went to the harbor to go sailing.

It was a "Rum Race" and there were about 20-30 sailboats participating. Because we had someone with us who was very experienced and had already participated in the American sailing race a few times, we came in second place. It wasn't very windy, so we were on the water for a long time and could enjoy the beautiful view, watch the seals occasionally come out of the water, and even watch the sunset.

Even at this point, I already thought that this day couldn't get any better.

Anyway, we won a bottle of rum and then took the ferry to Waiheke Island, which is famous for wine tours.

Once we arrived there, we attended the birthday party of a multimillionaire who was also part of the band, and we had a great evening there with the rum and so on :)

Anyway, I also got to know someone there, let's call him Peter 1 because I don't remember his name anymore. He invited us to a Latino house party, and after some back and forth, we decided not to take the ferry back and go to the party. It was exclusively Argentinians, and the communication was not very successful.

I asked where the toilet was, and suddenly she started speaking Spanish and then said in English, "It was so nice to meet you, you should come more often," and hugged me because she thought I wanted to say goodbye.

The situation was very funny, and later the question came up of where we would actually sleep. We talked to Peter 2, who kindly offered us a room in his apartment.

After a few hours of sleep, the alarm clock rang, because I had to go back to Auckland to catch my flight to Sydney.

If you're wondering why I'm flying so early... I postponed my flight. By the way, I had a little struggle with this again. When I call Emirates in NZ, they always tell me that it's not possible. So I called Frankfurt for a moment, and they rescheduled my flight without any problems.

Back to the topic.

So we wanted to go to the harbor to go back to Auckland. We would have had to wait half an hour for the bus, so we decided to hitchhike and were picked up by a nice man with a cute dog.

So we then went back with the ferry, and it was a totally beautiful ferry ride.

Arriving in Auckland, I organized an Uber, which took us back to the car, and then we went to the airport...

I started shaking and had a stomachache, which probably came from the excitement, nervousness, sadness, anticipation...

It was nice that the two of them brought me to the airport. I'm sitting here in the airplane right now and can't believe that my year (or rather 11 months) in NZ is over.

By the way, I accidentally had my Swiss Army knife, which I got as a gift from my parents and has been with me for years, in my hand luggage...

At first, I was annoyed with myself because I thought they would take it away from me. Luckily, I was allowed to keep it. ☺️

(They always make such a fuss about it at the airport, and then you're allowed to take the knife with you...)