23rd Jan - Clevedon to Auckland

I did not get up until about 10 as I went back for a nap having woken up at 7.30. They had made an awesome cooked breakfast (Vaughn is a chef). It was great to have some coffee and natter over a full English.

Unfortunately my bike bag on the top of my pannier rack has a broken zip and when I was packing everything way I could not find my cable lock. It was on the top of the bag and must have fallen out between where I stopped yesterday for the toilets and the pub where I met Pete and Lesley. It meant that I had to go back and look for it as although I was not too bothered about the cable lock itself it had my whole key set attached in the lock. This meant that I had lost my D lock key and my padlock key! Arrgggg... These are both expensive to replace. The D lock is a lightweight version that I bought in Australia and they are hard to come by.

It was raining very heavily today and Vaugh very kindly said he would drive me back the 16km to see if we could see it on the side of the road. Unfortunately we did not find the lock and keys but we did see the village that I had passed through yesterday all flooded. There was a king tide this morning and it had also rained very heavily over night and so the sea was really high and flooded several houses by the beach. It was good that we were in Vaugh's 4 by 4. There were children literally swimming in the water over the road. It turned out that in fact a big part of Auckland had flooded with all of the rain and the king tide and it was a major story on the news. My lock may well have been under the water.

Vaugh kindly phoned around the lock smiths in town see where was open tomorrow and could cut a replacement key for me (I have a magic code which is unique to the lock which means new keys can be cut). Fortunately they will be able to do it tomorrow :-)

Vaughn and Kate gave me a lift to Pete and Lesley's. They had kindly said that they would put me up for my stay in Auckland. I was really happy as they are lovely people and the friends of the Samoans that I had been planning on staying with were hesitant about having a stranger stay with them.

Lesley is the hostess with the mostest. They were really welcoming. They have a 9 month old son who made me all broodie (not good when traveling round the world). We all went for a Sunday afternoon wonder round the park which is just down the road from their house. It was still raining lightly but was really warm.

Lesely cooked an awesome dinner and we had a chilled evening chatting. I had been planning on getting to Auckland city last night and then seeing if I could crew on a boat which was racing today. Auckland is known as "City of Sails" and as I am missing sailing I really wanted to sail from a city which is famous for the sport. Unfortunately the weather was so horrendous last night and today that in fact I was very happy just to have a chilled Sunday with some lovely people.