Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-jog

Jane Reporting

About 8am yesterday we headed away from Anne and Lloyd's place in Auckland for the 6.5 hour drive home to Palmerston North. I did try to stay awake to check that Gary was now re-adjusted back to being on the left side of the road but he said that it felt very relaxing to be driving on 'the usual side'.

The Auckland traffic (which we do all love to moan about) was not too much of a problem and on a much smaller scale than all those trips through LA.

Traffic on the Auckland motorway system

The last couple of weeks of our trip were in dry, desert or desert-like areas and even when it was raining it was still a fairly barren landscape. Even the light rain we had for the first part of our journey yesterday the scenery was overwhelmingly green. New Zealand is at the end of its winter, but still the greenery was astounding.

State Highway 1

As can be seen we were off the big roads of the US and back on New Zealand's premier state highway, with opposing traffic separated only by the dashed white line down the middle of the road. If there was one improvement I would like to introduce to New Zealand from the US it would be their usage of the yellow line in road marking. On the road in the photo above the dashed white line would become a dashed yellow to indicate that on the other side of it traffic would be going in the opposite direction. In New Zealand (as can be seen by comparing the photo above with the one take on the motorway) a dashed white line can either be a lane marker for traffic heading in the same direction or be a divider between traffic heading in opposite directions. No wonder Americans feature so markedly in tourist crashes on our roads - not because they're driving on the wrong side of the road but because our road markings are subtly lying to them.

Here are some photos from the drive: