Day 48 - 11/19/22 - Tauranga, NZ - Day 2

 Due to adverse weather, we spent the night berthed at Tauranga.  Yesterday was a long but exciting and interesting day.  So we decided to not set an alarm and wake up naturally.  That wake up almost led to us not eating breakfast as it closed at 10am.  Fueled with breakfast, we headed on out to simply explore the port area on foot.  We walked up and down the many street adjoining the port and out and around Mt. Drury Park.  Throughout the day we encountered a number of older American muscle type cars and at one point I chatted with a fellow who had just imported a 1965 Ford Falcon Sprint.  It was a pretty nice car but needs some freshening up.


Angela had made arrangements with friends from the States who were traveling throughout New Zealand by car.  It turned out they would be in Tauranga today, so we met them for lunch at the BurgerFuel restaurant which is a New Zealand burger chain.  The burgers were excellent and the really unique part of the experience was the little cardboard device called a Doofer that is provided flat.  One assembles it and it forms sort of cup shape.  The doofer is then put on the bottom of the hamburger and used to hold it together and protect against drips.  It was good to meet up with Ray and Lorraine and catch up. I'm holding a doofer in the picture below.


After our late lunch, we walked out towards Mt. Maunganui along the beach.  Many kids were swimming and many crowd control gates were set up for a triathalon that will be held tomorrow.  We didn't walk all of the way to and around the mountain as we walked around it when we were here in 2014.  We returned to the ship where we relaxed before our 5:15pm departure.  


Captain Wouter van Hoogdalem did note that our Covid case count was up 6 cases today and 5 yesterday.  He didn't give the total case count, but based upon the previous numbers we probably have 52 reported cases onboard.  


This departure was performed with the assistance of two tugs on our port side as there was a very stiff breeze blowing at us and the channel is quite narrow with visible sand bars.  Our departure time was set to coincide with the tide flow being under 1.5 knots.  However as we departed, the Captain came on the PA system as we departed and warned us that he wasn't able to deploy the stabilizers as it was too shallow.  Therefore, after we passed the protection of Mt. Maunganui he expected that the ship might be rolling from side to side.  Fortunately that didn't happen.  Below is a picture of Mt. Maunganui and we'll pass just to the left of the mountain in a very narrow channel.





After dinner with Erik & Marilyn, we all attended the Cantaré Main Stage show "All In" which was once again very good although I like the musical selections better in their first set a few days ago.


Afterwards we returned to our stateroom where I did a final check-in for our next segment.  We also received an invitation to an award ceremony on Monday morning where we will be presented with a Platinum medallion for having sailed with Holland America for over 700 nights.  The next recognition level is the President's Club at over twice this amount of days.  We'll never reach that level and we haven't even tried to reach the Platinum level.  

Tomorrow is Sunday and we have a very short 5.5 hour time in Auckland from 7am until 12:30pm as we have to make a very high speed run with all 5 diesel engines online to reach Sidney on the 23rd of November.   

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