Goodbye, Betty

Hello, hello! We have reached our final destination of Auckland! And, by some miracle, we have also managed to get Betty sold!

We had posted her on a website here similar to Craigslist several weeks ago, but we'd had very few inquiries. But all you need is that ONE inquiry! We had an email from a lady named Sonnia, inquiring on behalf of someone that was WWOOFing for her, who was a backpacker, freshly landed in NZ, and eager to get on the road! We received this email on Friday, and wrote right back saying we'd be in Auckland the next day and would be more than happy to show the car as soon as we got in.

Well, the following day, when we were about an hour outside of Auckland, we decided to make a pit stop to check our email (we had stupidly forgotten to get the address of the hostel we'd booked for ourselves). We had a reply from Sonnia, saying they were in a town about 45 minutes from Auckland, and if it was on our way, maybe we could stop by! We called Sonnia immediately, and it turned out we were quite close by to her home.

Our potential buyer was Nico, a 30-something German guy who was going to be spending a year here, basically doing what Bjorn and I have done. He was just what we needed. He really just wanted a CAR. Didn't have to be fancy, didn't have to be nice, just needed to be able to lay himself down in the back if he wanted to sleep. Nico and Bjorn went out for a test drive, and within 20 minutes of our arrival, we'd shaken hands. We would sell Betty to Nico for $1100, which, considering we bought her for $1550 eight months ago, is GREAT for us. We are thrilled.

We knew it was really right - destined to be, in fact - when we heard Nico giving his birth date over the phone to the car insurance people. March 16 - same as Bjorn! So Betty gets another Pisces owner. Wonderful!

We finished off all the paperwork, and then Nico drove us the short distance into Auckland and dropped us off at our hostel door, which was exactly what we needed, considering we still had all our crap in it. We shuffled everything into our sufficiently large room here, again shook hands with Nico, and said goodbye to Betty. What a good girl she was. I hope Nico has as much fun with her as we did.

So we arrived in Auckland on a Saturday and didn't have to attend the Sunday morning car fair at all! Of course, now we're sort of in limbo. We don't have any means of transportation, and well, we don't really have anywhere to go anyway. So we are just hanging around Auckland until our departure on Friday. We're exploring the city a bit, catching up on our movie-watching, reading up on Thailand, and trying to get packed!

We luckily had the foresight to check the weight limit on checked luggage for our flight to Bangkok, and realized we were limited to 44 pounds per person. That's not much for an international flight. So now we are going to ship a box full of crapola to Sweden, including my laptop. It's a slight hassle, but, it would be more of a hassle having all that stuff with us in Thailand. A traveller with too much baggage is a vulnerable traveller, I think. So just backpacks for us again!

Okay, we are now off to see Slumdog Millionaire. I'm excited. Check out my recent pictures (though there aren't too many). I realized, as I was posting the most recent album, that I had never made the last album public. So sorry about that! http://picasaweb.google.com/ellen.bucy

Hope everyone is well! Much love.