Kia Ora!

As my man Robert Plant says "It's time to ramble on." And here is where the two of us wanderers will attempt to stay in contact with everyone we are leaving behind. We do not know when or where a computer may befall our adventures but we will do our best to take advantage of them when they do. We depart LAX Friday evening at 9:40 pm and proceed to not have a Saturday, August 26th and land in Auckland Sunday morning at 5am... I wonder where that day goes? In any case, we grieve the loss of the day and wish its loved ones a short mourning period. Anyway... we have graciously been offered a place to rest our heads in the city when we arrive with a friend of a friend, whose name is Brad. In that first couple of days we then hope to find an old beater car to purchase that will carry us along our way for the next three months. Once a car is on hand, we will leave Auckland and head north to the town of Kaiwaka where we will stay for a while (? the length of time is undetermined at this time) with Robert & Marijke and their two sons in what they call the Otamatea Eco-Village where it seems we may be helping build a mud brick home and enjoying celestial views of the countryside. I have posted a picture the family sent us of their view at dawn. For those of you who do not know... we are traveling through an organization called WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) which allows us to travel at our own pace and set up places to stay and work along the way. The jest of it is that we call a farm about a week or two in advance and ask them if they could use two workers for a bit and if they say "yes" then we will live and work with them for generally about a week. We receive room and board for about 4 hours work each day.. this of course is not to be confused with migrant working :) . So where we will stay and what we will do is filled with a lot of question marks, but hopefully we will be able to post here our schedule as we go. WWOOF is an international organization and is biggest in the UK, Canada, and Australia/New Zealand although you can find it here in the US. Elisabeth traveled through British Columbia via these means two summers ago and knows a lot more of what to expect. If you want to learn more you can visit WWOOF online. So we wish you all a wonderful and advantageous next couple of months and look forward to catching up upon return. We will graciously accept emails and comments as we will be hopefully be checking them ever so often.

Sincerely,
Mattie Ruth