Last Day in New Zealand 🇳🇿

Last days are usually sad ones wherever I go but today I was reminded by Kathleen that I get to see Drew again in a few weeks when he visits Toronto . It never changes even for someone that travels as much as I do , so for the first part of the day I was feeling a bit dumpy and the more the day went by the more I sat around thinking 🤔 and not in a making plans way of thinking but just head in the clouds kinda thinking with no thought process . Kinda like a bliss . Anyways enough of my philosophizing bullshit mumbo jumbo . The day started with me pretending I didn’t have a hangover from the day of travelling with the Dunedin boys to play hockey and drink our faces off .... I mean it wasn’t that bad but I did feel a bit off but anyways we jumped out of bed and went to grab our morning Starbucks and started to work things out for our day . Today we have a city tour on a trike , yes a trike ! A motorcycle with 5 seats that looked so cool as fuck that I was dying and so looking forward to rolling around town on . That tour was scheduled and paid for to roll out at 230 pm and we had to get there early and the meeting point is in the octagon outside the I-Site tourist center . So the plan is chill then go to this breakfast joint called Capers then hit up the tour ...

As we chilled I received an email from the tour , it was cancelled ! WTF !!! Apparently high winds is an excuse for a day off for the operator of this tour and a safety thing so he stood firm and didn’t budge on the idea of doing this ... even when the wind died down he didn’t budge and I’m dead serious when I say I begged the man to keep our money and give us any tour . It must be a thing here where tours are more then willing to give money back to just stay home ? Really we paid $130 NZD for the both of us for an hour and he sent it back with no hesitation .... that’s two tours we planned that both mysteriously were not going to happen . So now what do we do ? We wanted to see a few things in town and now our options would have us skipping our planned brunch and hitting the road with bus loads of tourists which was not really something we want so we walked over to the tourist center to see if they had any ideas 💡? Essentially they agreed we should just do what we want on our own and we decided on doing brunch at Capers then discussing our plan of attack which lead us to Baldwin Street which is the Guinness world record holder for steepest street in the world . Our breakfast was really good . I had the big breakfast which has bacon , mushrooms , beans , eggs and pork sausages ... don’t listen to Kathleen that wasn’t lamb ! For the record I don’t eat lamb because I don’t want to ! Not gonna make any excuses , I just don’t want to . We took a bus to Baldwin and looked up the steep street and battled our way up it as we walked past the sign above that clearly says it’s only for residential use and I did see a resident walk out of his house with a look on his face of unhappiness towards me ? Some of the tourists are loud and disrespectful and I can understand where the residents are coming from but if you don’t want to deal with that then maybe moving away is a good option . Tough beans I’m hiking up this muthafucka . It was steep ! No shit eh 🤪

After hiking the hill and heading back down we headed into town by bus and ended up in the octagon with indecisiveness hanging over us . Kathleen said we should go for a beer , I kinda wanted a milkshake or smoothie and I just sat on a bench and sent another email looking to see if the trike tour operator would reconsider his decision and he again denied me . It wasn’t even windy at that point . As I was sending that email one of the guys from the hockey team walked up ...DG ! We said hi and he said he was going to grab a smoothie or fruit drink but the place was closed and I offered to go for a beer at that point , yeah Kathleen gave me that WTF look 👀 . We grabbed a couple decent IPA’s and his wife and daughter joined us and we spoke about the motorized scooters we see flying all over the place and he said we should definitely try them so we uploaded the app called Lime and he gave us some promo codes and when our beers were done we headed back to the hotel to change into some more leisure clothing and found a couple of those scooters and went for a rip . We both loved them , they are awesome and I highly suggest giving them a shot if you ever get the chance . I really hope they have them in Perth and I wish I tried them earlier . They get up to 25 or 27 km an hour but you gotta be careful for traffic and pedestrians or end up in a hospital which I’m not down with doing . After a half hour of tearing up Dunedin’s streets and sidewalks we decide it’s time to stop and get ready for dinner . 

I’m keeping this blog post short and sweet as I’m sitting on a plane to Perth as I write this .... we met up with Drew one last time to grab a bite at Lone Star which has no affiliation with the Lone Star franchise in North America but is basically the same type of food . BBQ ! I had me some ribs and they were good a meaty unlike the honey ones I had in Queenstown . As you can see above in the pic we took after dinner I’m eating well ... maybe too well . We hung out with Drew for a while and chatted and made plans for when he is coming to Toronto and then said our good byes .... gave him a big hug and we walked away and he honked his horn as he drove by us . Drew you’re a real friend man and I’m gonna spoil you rotten when you’re in Toronto with us , thanks for dinner buddy and all you did to make us comfortable in Dunedin . People like Drew make it hard to say good bye but also keep me wanting to travel and if it weren’t for hockey I’m not sure how I would make friends like this . If that isn’t enough excuse for anyone to get off their ass’ to travel and play hockey then I don’t know what is . Peace ✌️.