Three’s nothing like a good night’s sleep...and I got nothing like a good night’s sleep at the muggy Maraetai POP The morning started cool and damp. After leaving the POP, a bit more slowly that I’d hoped, a Bob wanted to chat, I rolled off to a local regional park, Omana, to find a grassy spot overlooking the Tamaki Strait and Waiheke, and had coffee and breakfast.

 

After breakfast, I drove out to Clevedon along the coast route from Maraetai and the weather improved to blue skies and puffy clouds. After parking, I took a relatively short bike ride back to coast and back via North Road. It was a rolling ride of about 25km, an upgrade from the flat riding I’d been doing around Miranda.

 

Clevedon is a great place to ride from as there is a town center to park and eat at and a choice of rides from flat to hilly nearby. This makes it a popular cycling spot. Unfortunately for my ego, it means that I get passed quite a bit by fit road and triathlon cyclists in training.

 

After lunching by the Clevedon Showgrounds, I headed back to Botany Downs to find a hotspot to transfer mail and attempt to upload this site and journals. Easier said than done. The email went well enough, but uploading the files generated by iWeb to my magnell.org server just wouldn’t happen. I could log on to the server and even list the directories, but file transfer just seemed to hang. I tried several FTP clients and several modes of operation, but transfers were glacially slow (pre-global warming), if they happened at all.

 

I finally gave up and took out a trial subscription to .Mac and uploaded to it since iWeb is actually designed to interface seemlessly with .Mac. It’s only good for 60 days, so I will need to find a way to upload and sync to my own site.

 

 Since I was planning to make a long call home on Friday and my friend Peter had graciously offered the use of his home office and phone, I wanted to stay close to Howick, where he lives. There were a couple of promising campgrounds in the, one in Remuera, one of the most tony Auckland suburbs, and one in Manakau, a not a bit tony suburb.

 

I called the Remuera campground first, but they had a minimum of three days stay. I could stay only one night but it would still cost $60. That was a non-starter, so I called the Manakau Top 10.

 

They had one powered site left; I reserved it and headed over. Ellen, Sam and I had spent a night there once before, when we brought the Bongo over to pickup our friends, the Chisholms and the Fishers, when they arrived on a 6 am flight. We arrived at the campground well after dark and were assigned a site in a corner and left early the next morning. It seemed very crowded and not very pleasant, so I wasn’t looking forward to it again.

 

Actually, in the daylight, the campground, while tight, was quite clean and modern. It had no permanent residents (which happens in city campgrounds and they aren’t the nicest sort), and the powered sites were flat and graveled.

 

The campground caters mostly to rental campervans on their way back to the airport. It is good place for the last night if you have a daytime flight. Today, however, it was chock-a-block with tents full of 20-somethings.

 

It turns out that Friday was “The Big Day Out”, an annual outdoor multi-artist rock concert held nearby. The campground was an inexpensive place for concertgoers to stay the night before. It seemed to be mostly groups of guys or gaggles of girls (I should say “young women”, but where’s the alliteration?), each group in their respective tents.

 

It didn’t look promising for a good night’s sleep, but I was surprised, it quieted down around 10:30 and it was pretty pleasant.