We are now officially Cape Crusaders!

Our tour guide, Arial (like TV not the Little Mermaid! he says), has informed us. We survived our bus tour to Cape Reinga (Ree-unga), the northernmost point of New Zealand and, according to Maori legend, the place where the souls of the departed leap from the earth.

How did we survive, you ask? It was not easy, for we faced many challenges along the way. First, we traveled from Auckland to Paihia, visiting some great little glow worm caves on the way. Once in Paihia, we checked into our hotel, had dessert for lunch at the only place that offered free wi-fi, returned later for dinner, and attempted to book a tour for Cape Reinga. However, as we had arrived in off-season, the tour companies closed early. Our receptionist, Colleen, assisted us greatly by booking all of our events while we had dinner.

Seriously, Colleen at the Tanoa Paihia Hotel is the best ever and everyone should go to Paihia and stay at the Tanoa Paihia Hotel.

Anyways, she booked our tour, and at seven am the following morning, we boarded the bus and met our tour guide, Arial. We stopped at a subtropical rainforest, where naturally we were rained on. However, the weather was exceedingly stormy the entire day.

After our very wet bushwalk through the forest, we continued on to lunch, then to the Cape, where the wind was upwards of 45 mph. We were nearly blown off the Cape. Our souls would not have needed to travel very far to leap off to the spirit world. Thank goodness we didn't actually get blown away.

After the Cape, we went sandboarding, as we were promised in the tour brochure. Sandboarding is like snowboarding, only on giant sand dunes. My poor little heart could barely take it as I made it to the top, and it probably didn't help that this was during a sandstorm.

I'm still getting sand out of places.

But it was still lots of fun, and on our way back we stopped to get the best fish and chips in the world. The catch of the day was Blue Nose, a deep sea fish. That was the best fish and chips I've ever had.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we survived, and Arial has proclaimed us official Cape Crusaders, and we can run around in our little Batman Onezies if we so choose.