X-Base—we meet again

On Thursday, March 29, we left at 7 am to start our 3 hour drive to the Northland. The Northland included an area that we stayed at called the Bay of Islands. It was a very touristy area to be at and had beautiful beaches, fun shops, yummy food, and even islands that multiple cruise ships came to. It was definitely a more upscale place to go and made me feel like I was in the area where most tourists would travel to if they were going to go to New Zealand. 

In the Bay of Islands we stayed at our favorite X-Base hostel again! Luckily this hostel was a lot nicer than the one that we stayed at in Queenstown on the South Island. That one was more of a party central area, where this was more on the upscale, quite side (everything closed at 10pm actually haha). None of us got bug bites at this hostel, I didn't have any blood on my sheets—yay, and for the most part it was pretty nice. It even had a small pool that was freezing and hot tub that was either burning hot or too cold lol. But we had a lot of fun in our eight person bunk bed room. Probably a little TOO much fun :). I loved the girls I was able to room with during our 5 day trip. We had so much fun!!

As soon as we got to the Northland we got on a boat to go swim with dolphins. The weather was horrible though, so when we found out that it was a SMALL chance that we would actually get to see dolphins, let alone swim with them, we decided we would wait and go on Monday instead. So the rest of the day we walked around the town, visited the shops, ate a big BBQ with our X-Base vouchers, and then tried to get in the hot tub but it was cold so we FROZE. It was ok though because we all ended up hopping in the hot shower together in our suits to warm up. 

Home sweet home. haha oh boy.

First try to go swimming with dolphins was a failure because of the weather.
Don't worry, we lucked out on Monday :).

"Backpackers hostels". I also love how there are always
signs here in NZ that say "Church LDS" on them for
people to find our chapels. 

Grocery shopping has definitely been an adventure on our tours together.
What usually happens is that Ramona gives us each a certain amount of
money to use for food for the week, James drives us to a close grocery store,
and then we all work together to figure out the cheapest way to use
that money on food so that we can then use the rest on fun stuff.

It is funny because we will buy bread, milk, eggs, peanut butter, and jam to
split between a small group of us. But what usually happens is some of the
group will want to split the eggs and bread but not the milk or peanut butter
because they won't eat it. So we end up taking FOREVER to figure out
who is going to pay for what and who owes who what. It was quite the
challenge (stressful at times) but really fun to work together to save
money and split our food!!!

Look what we found hidden in the shops :)

I'm going to miss yummy fresh fruit ice cream so much!

Time for our X-Base BBQ dinner!

Oh yummy. I actually only liked the steak...it was REALLY good :)

Me and 3 other girls bought a huge carton of eggs and decided to boil all
of them so we could have hard boiled eggs for lunches. We were getting
pretty sick of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by this trip!

Cooking in the X-Base hostel kitchen. They have everything you need to
be able to make food. . .how CLEAN it is. . .that's a different story.

All our hard boiled eggs. I love how the eggs are brown in NZ and come
in these big carts like this!

Our hostel room. Kirsten, Brittany, Micah, Mikaela, Brooke, Brooke, Sarah,
and me. We didn't have any people from different countries this time.

But we sure had some fun parties, girl talks, and movie
nights on Brooke's laptop. Good times :)