Raglan

After MOTAT, we drove on south of Auckland and eventually west and back to the Tasman coast and, after a night at the Onewhere Rugby Club freedom camp, the town of Raglan. Raglan was one of New Zealand's earliest European settlements, but is best known now for its surfing and appearance in the classic Endless Summer. Surfers and surfboards still abound as well as much of the world's tie dye inventory and other 60s paraphrenalia. The vibe is friendly and small town. We explored on foot until the rain forced us back to the camper and on down the road to Whale (?) Bay to watch people surfing in the rain.

Among the older buildings, the Harbor View Hotel

A few instances of art deco

Some very big old trees

Commemorating the first Methodist missionaries to arrive...1830's...
possibly first use of the expression "missionary position" in the 
South Seas

More really big old trees

Fun on the harbor

More Cooke Island Pines

Main drag

Now on the Bay, watching surfers, mostly waiting, not surfing

Looking out upon the Tasman Sea

And on to Ruapuke Beach and the "motor camp" there

MOTAT Aviation Hall

After switching rigs at Jucy, we drove out to Auckland's MOTAT (Museum of Transport and Technology) to see its Aviation Hall and its vintage aircraft and memorial to one of New Zealand's WWII heroes, Sir Keith Park, who commanded the 11th Fighter Group defending London during the Battle of Britain. The Aviation Hall has some dozens of aircraft, and I'll focus on just a few either new to me or of special interest.

A replica of Park's personal Hawker Hurricane, OK-1, which he
used to get around to the various airbases in his command; the
Spitfire is pretty much the emblem of the Battle of Britain, but
the Hurricane accounted for 70% of the kills, mostly among the
German bombers; part of Park's strategy was to let the Spitfires
engage and distract the German escort fighters, while the slower
Hurricanes attacked the bombers... 

The Brits' Avro Lancaster heavy bomber, somewhat similar to the
US B-24; of "Dambusters" fame

Evidently, quite a number of New Zealanders were in the RAF's
Bomber Command

A Bomber Command office

The Mosquito, aka the "Wooden Wonder," high performance
fighter/bomber; made from composite wood...kept the UK's
furniture manufacturers busy during the war

Sunderland flying boat/patrol bomber

There, beneath all the craft above 

The Solent, post-war commercial and passenger flying boat

Lockheed Electra

The Flying Flea (below)

A kit plane from the 30s

Dangerous, never popular...

DeHavilland Dragon Rapide

The US Navy's TBF-1 Avenger, standard torpedo bomber after
Midway; President George W. H. Bush flew one of these (until
shot down in central Pacific action)

About as large as a single engine plane ever got; I reckon

The Navy's Mark XIII torpedo...lots of problems

And finally a Curtiss P-40, earlier WWII US fighter

Return To Orewa Beach And Auckland; And A Different Rig

After Waipu we thought we'd return to the Tasman side and explore some coastal scenery northwest of Auckland. En route, however, we decided to spend a couple lazy days back at Orewa Beach. It was a fateful decision since it was there, at the Orewa Beach Holiday Park, that we discovered our Jucy Chaser was not connecting to the AC current at the campground. The mains, as Brits say. As our house battery dwindled and we enacted the usual conservation measures, I checked every connection that could be checked. The mains worked, the electrical cord worked, no fuses burned nor tripped; nothing got past the electrical box in the camper, however. 

A day and a half of calls to Jucy in Auckland availed nothing but promises to have someone come and look at it; and a dozen un-returned calls and messages. Saturday we decided to just drive to the Jucy facility in Auckland. The mechanic there never actually got to the electrical problem but found something else amiss in the water heater and said we'd have to change vehicles. So we unhappily spent Saturday morning at Jucy transferring all our stuff, including many improvements and additions we'd made, to the new vehicle. This all took four hours. The good news is that the "new" vehicle, identical in design and features to the old, has 40k fewer kilometers and appears much less worn on the interior. It even had a kettle. Everything, including the connection to mains, works. Plus we had the opportunity to once again go through all our stuff. 

One of the things I had wanted to see in Auckland was the MOTAT Aviation Hall, its vintage aircraft and its memorial to Sir Keith Park, Auckland native and commander of the 11th Fighter Group that defended London during the Battle of Britain. We did this and then headed south to overnight at Onewhere Rugby Football Club facility and its freedom camp. By no means our first campsite at a rugby club.

In addition to nice walks on the beach, into town, and a nice lunch,
there were some Pohutukawa trees in Orewa still in bloom

Our Saturday morning consisted of moving the contents of the left
one to the right one