Susan's visit - Auckland and Hamilton

After a fortnight of really terrible weather involving a lot of rain, thunder and lightning, the weather finally improved a bit just in time for Susan’s arrival. She arrived in Auckland late on Sunday 29th June so we picked her up and brought her back to the Oosty household where Carolanne and Ron were delighted to meet her.

The next morning I was letting her have a lie in to get over her jet lag, which was rudely interrupted by her jumping on my bed to get me up… Our first stop for the day was to update the rego (a kind of car tax) on our van that we’d forgotten about paying. From there we went on to Barracuda to pick Seán up as he had gone in early with Dave to fix his polo boat so Susan got to see some of the factory and meet Dave and Steve during smoko.

We then went back towards the city and drove up Mount Victoria where you can get a great view of Auckland (you can see both in the first pic). Just to the east of the mountain is North Head, which was of prime importance to the Kiwi’s during the war. They dug tunnels through the headland and put canons there to protect the city. We walked through some of the tunnels with my little head torch to guide us.

To get an even better view of the city we then went into the centre of the city and up the Sky Tower, something Seán and I had been meaning to do since we arrived! We were about to head home when we got a call from Alan saying he was in Auckland for the week and did we want to meet up, so we ended up staying in town for dinner with him before Susan started wilting from the jet lag and we got back home.


The next morning we hit the road to Rotorua. You may remember that I spent a while in the City Library doing a genealogy search and found a possible relative in Hamilton. On our way down the road I gave her a call and it turned out our guess work was on the mark. Margaret turned out to be a sprightly 80 year old who was very excited to hear from us and delighted to have us visit. It turned out that if we’d contacted her a month earlier she wouldn’t have known much about the family history at all, but her son had recently become interested in it all and was also researching. She had unfortunately just posted most of the information and photo’s off to her son, Tracey, but had just enough left to keep us occupied for a couple of hours. She told us all about her children, numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, together with some details of her Robinson in-laws. We left with piles of information to relay to home and promises of meeting again and continued on our road trip!