Dave went home -- or tried to. Brunnen-G, Leen, and I (Puck had to work, but he met us at the airport) took Dave down to see him off, but there we discovered (after much line waiting) that the United flight to L.A. the day before had been delayed until that day, and Dave's flight wouldn't be leaving until 2:30am that night. Rather than try to fly out that afternoon stand-by, or return in the middle of the night, Dave transferred to the flight out the next day, which was our flight. Got it?

So we had another day, and Puck, who had gone down to the airport on his lunch hour to "make sure [Dave] leaves," was disappointed. (Incidentally, it'll give you an idea of how small the airport is if I note that there was no specific place *inside* the airport that we had arranged to meet Puck at. He was just going to come down to the airport at some point during his lunch hour and meet up with us. If you tried to do this at LAX or O'Hare or Dulles or something, you'd NEVER cross paths with the people you were trying to meet. You'd just wander around lost until you strayed too far from "downtown airport" and into "the bad part of the airport" where someone would mug you and stuff you in a broom closet.)

New Zealand McDonald's

We had to break down and eat at McDonald's at some point, partly to see if they're the same, and partly because I wanted to try their Kiwiburger, a special burger that's only sold in New Zealand McDonald's. We ate at the McDonald's in the airport, and here's the verdict: it's exactly the same. Right down to the ketchup (tomato sauce!), which surprises me, because the McDonald's we ate at in Germany once in a while was the same except for (1) bad ketchup, and (2) different sweet-n-sour sauce. I never did figure out which sweet-n-sour sauce I preferred, because I always seemed to prefer the one I had most recently. Whenever I flew the Atlantic one way or another, I wouldn't like the sweet-n-sour sauce the first time I had it, then I'd be used to it by the second. But that's neither here nor there.

One menu difference: you could add a "Flake" to a McFlurry for an additional NZ $0.50. A "flake" is like a wrinkly sheet of dried chocolate stuff, rolled up and smooshed together so it's a solid tube sort of thing. Flakes are sold in candy bar form over there, and one or two types of New Zealand candy bars have flakes inside them with gunk around them. We didn't get a Flake at McDonald's, but we had one in candy bar form later. Verdict: gross. Like everything in New Zealand, the sugar was forcibly extracted prior to packaging. The chocolate didn't really taste like chocolate so much as mashed up cocoa beans.

That brings me to the other menu difference: the Kiwiburger. It's like a quarterpounder, but with a fried egg beneath the burger and a slice of beet above it. Prior to this point, I had been picking off the beets, even though I'm pretty neutral about them as a food, and I figured I should not leave the country before I actually tried a burger with the beet on it. So I did.

The beet was weird. Not altogether bad. I think I could get used to it and be all right with it. But I was thinking, what the heck is the POINT? It's this discontinuous taste of THING getting in the way of everything else. The egg, however, was DELICIOUS, not that I was dubious about that -- the egg burgers I had had previously were great -- so much as the fact that McDonald's eggs aren't usually the greatest things in the world. But that egg was done PERFECTLY. Numnumnumnum....

Puck told us later that when McDonald's first came to New Zealand, it took a while for their burgers to be accepted. There were a lot of publicity stunts, lots of "Meet Ronald McDonald!" things going on in the restaurants to get people in the doors, etc. The idea of pickles on burgers was foreign to New Zealanders at the time, and there wasn't enough other gunk on them.

Yet More Beaches

We went to Wenderholm Regional Park, where everybody but me swam in the ocean. Then we briefly stopped at Orewa Beach, where we admired the surf. We stopped for ice cream, naturally, and Leen and I loaded up on a bunch of New Zealand candy bars, so we could try those. (Most of them were gross. Candy is supposed to have SUGAR in it!)

Ice

We passed a store with an ice cooler in front of it. The ice cooler had a brand name on it. It was "Cool Az" brand of "Ice." "Cool Az...Ice." Get it?

North Head

North Head is one of New Zealand's many lumpy land masses that stick out into the ocean a bit. It's a big grass-covered hill that has ocean frontage on most of its sides. The military fortified it with guns and lookouts and all sorts of fun combat stuff way back when there was threat of Russian invasion in 1895. It continued to be used during the world wars in case of a Japanese invasion. But no invasion ever happened, and today the navy has evacuated, leaving behind only the tunnels and a few defunct guns.

Various portions of this hill look like (1) The Death Star, (2) dungeon-based computer RPGs like Wizardry and Bard's Tale, and (3) Wolfenstein 3D.

You can go all over the grassy hill part, which is steep on the sides and rounded on top, with brush-lined pathways winding around amidst the grassy spots. We encountered the first abandoned tunnel, entered, and immediately found ourselves in PITCH dark. This first cave was a natural cavern of some sort -- there were two normal exits on different faces of the hill, and if you went around a corner inside, there was a little football-sized lookout hole, where you could SPY BADGUYS AS THEY WALKED.

Later on we entered some more manmade tunnels, equally as dark. We purposely did not have a light. So imagine four people thrust in total darkness, with NO idea what's inside -- could be stairs, a sudden wall, a dip in the ceiling, a monster, a Nazi, anything. So Leen was hanging onto the back of my shirt like her life depended on it, and I was high on the thrill of danger. We explored a tunnel, discovered side passages purely by feel, and encountered several dead ends, including some with windows. Imagine being in total darkness and rooting around through a window in a concrete wall -- big monsters tend to eat arms off very suddenly under those conditions. I stuck my head through one of the windows and hoisted myself up a little and found another room beyond that I could just barely see, because there was a very faint source of light coming from somewhere beyond, around the corner.

So we backtracked and found all the side passageways and stairs and rooms and emerged at last into the daylight -- at the bottom of a well where these massive guns were mounted. They were aimed out of the well and pointed out to sea. So we climbed all over them.

Further on, we found the secret entrance to the Death Star Engine Generator Room. (The sign even said "Generator Room" or some such.) The secret entrance was this narrow passageway set in the hill -- stone wall on both sides, maybe three feet apart, no ceiling, but thick brush on both sides obscuring the tunnel from up above. So I climbed all over the stone walls.

Inside the generator room, there were metal bars set in concrete blocks and unkempt concrete walls and interior wall things and places to bounce around, and finally we climbed out the other side where there was this raised concrete platform. So we took turns leaping up onto the concrete platform. And then there were these metal spinny things mounted on the concrete from the outside, and you could turn them.

So then we climbed to the top of the hill and climbed on the guns from up top, and climbed on the little decorative stone walls, and climbed up some of the vertical grassy pieces of hill.

So then we went around to the other side of the hill, after carefully making sure we hadn't missed any little paths or tunnels, which would have been easy to do, and we go to the Nazi prison camp and torture chambers (it REALLY seemed like Wolfenstein 3D when this other guy walked by with a German shepherd), which were these squat concrete buildings with concrete thingies all around, and there were these inset storage areas in the concrete, and you could see where there were iron hinges, but there weren't any doors. And we found one piece of heavy iron ring thing that was so rusted, it looked like tree bark. And we went into, and around, and on top of the concrete buildings, and on top we found what looked to be these cannonball chute things, sort of like a bowling ball return device, except that it was used to lift cannonballs up from the storage areas underground.

So we went underground, and it was FAR to dark to see by, and I was scared, so I didn't explore exactly EVERYTHING down there, but we did find where the bottom of the cannonball chutes were. Since it was pitch dark, except for a little tiny bit of daylight streaming in from the top of the chute, the glow cast on the cannonball device at the bottom make the structure look like the altar of some evil underground pagan god. So we kicked it. But the iron and brick and all was pretty solid.

Moving on to another climbable building, I stopped to read a little explanatory plaque thing. The gun house I was standing in front of housed a particular type of gun that was first used in 1919. Firing the gun caused people's windows to shatter, so the navy planted some trees around to break up the sound. By the time the trees grew up enough to be effective, the gun was obsolete.

Finally we had explored all the gun houses and tunnels and caves and guns, we had to return to the car...by way of a steep downhill grass slope. BG had the idea of sliding down them, but she didn't want to get any grass stains on her clothing, so she tried sliding down on one of her beach towels.

Note: towels adhere. It wasn't quite the turbulent gravity thrill ride (see: Day 3) that she was hoping for. In fact, it was rather amusing to see exactly just how SLOW she slid down that hill. So she climbed back up and tried going down on her stomach instead, and that sort of ended up both she and the towel rolling to the side and down. At the bottom, it got a little bit steeper, so there was about a second at the end where it was not so much a gravity thrill ride, but it was at least turbulent.

So then I tried it and had the same results. And then Dave tried it. He fell off.

Actually it was ok until a spot near the end where it got suddenly steeper. He gained some sudden momentum, slipped, got mildly airborne, and he came down in a thrashing lump with reeling limbs attached to it.

Driving Around

In the car, Dave and I hummed the 20th Century Fox theme song (with the Cinemascope Extension), plus some Star Wars and Superman, for Brunnen-G's benefit. This is an important part of the essence of Sam and Dave together.

We drove through downtown Auckland and got to see some more of the city, including The Civic, which is the world's best place to see a movie -- but no movies were playing while we were there (they also host stage shows) so we didn't get to go. Still, I saw the outside of it.

Driving through Auckland was a breeze. Neither Leen nor I figured it would be the least little bit stressful to drive through any part of Auckland at all. It was like driving through a small town, only it was big. There are about five blocks of skyscrapery stuff, and the streets around them are all sane, and the entire rest of the city consists of quiet little suburban-type neighborhoods with lots of grass and trees in the yards and along the streets. There isn't any part of Auckland that is overpoweringly cityish.

Dinner

Some of us got Pizza Hut takeaway, and some of us got Generic Food takeaways. When Pizza Hut was introduced to New Zealand, they were nearly all sit-down type restaurants. Now they're almost all table-less takeaway shops, like our Domino's Pizza places are. Takeaway is big business in New Zealand, but we knew that.

I got a Hawaiian Burger, which is basically a burger with a thick slice of pineapple on it. It RULED. I'm sure you can get Hawaiian Burgers elsewhere in the United States (like, for example, Hawaii, if nowhere else), but we can't get them in New England. (Hawaiian pizza, yes; Hawaiian burgers, no.) It RULED. I LOVED that. I'm not crazy about pineapple by itself, but in a burger or on pizza...drool.

Over our meals, we got to talking with Puck about other food differences. New Zealanders don't have anything like squash pie, pumpkin pie, or sweet potato pie. Puck tried one of those (pumpkin, I think) and thought it was weird but said it was probably something he could get used to. But he said the idea of a sweet vegetable pie comes across as a very odd idea to New Zealanders. Frankly, it's odd to me, too, but I love all those pies.

The Goon Show

That night, we listened to some audio tapes of The Goon Show, an oldish British radio show starring Peter Sellers, Spike Mulligan, and Harry Secombe. Hilarious stuff.

Later on Brunnen-G's mother called, asking how the trip was going, and she said she wanted to talk to one of the three of us. Leen and Dave don't do phones, and that left me. So I talked with Brunnen-G's mother and assured her we had had a fantastic time.

Birds

1 new, 20 total: Myna, Spotted Dove (!!), House Sparrow, Welcome Swallow, Blackbird, Red-Billed Gull, Black-Backed Gull, Mallard, Dove (whatever the white kind is they release at weddings), Spur-Winged Plover, Black-Fronted Tern (*), White-Fronted Tern, Pukeko, Black Swan, European Starling, Silvereye, Fan Tail, Pied Oyster Catcher, Wild Turkey, New Zealand Scaup.