Despite the fact that it is the yuppiest, most up-and-coming part of Auckland, we decided to stay in Parnell again. We had made no reservation and were slightly concerned about getting a room (it was 5pm). Also, Joan had to write some emails, so we wanted to find a place with an available phone line.

Most of the budget "Backpackers" hostels have pay phones and don't want you using the office phones. A backpacker hostel is something you don't find much of in the US. It is a step up from a youth hostel but a step below a hotel. Unlike a youth hostel you don't have to do any chores and you can get your own room for a few dollars more. Otherwise you can stay in a bunk in a room with 4 or more people. Prices can be as cheaper than $10 per person even in Auckland. Like a youth hostel, you have access to a well equipped kitchen so you can eat cheaply. Also, you share the bathrooms and usually you don't get a towel.

That's pretty much how the City Garden hostel we stayed at the first time through Auckland was. We had our own room, which was nice, but like all of them, the walls are thin and the place seems noisy. Even in our room it didn't feel private since we could hear conversations outside. We liked the place but this time we wanted more privacy and a phone line to connect the Newton.

It turned out that just up the road from the City Garden is a place called the Parnell Motor Lodge. They had a room for $75(NZ) - $47US with an easy to reach phone connector and lots of outlets plus the room was superb so we took it.

The 6 email messages we downloaded disappointed us. 4 were junk mail and once again one of them was for pornography. Joan was especially disappointed that her birthday, which passed Oct. 27, went unnoticed by all her email correspondants except her brother Vince, who sent a timely note earlier.

One of the emails was from my friend and former boss in San Francisco, Buck Smith. Apparently he got an email from a guy at the University of Auckland that was having a problem with some obscure software I worked on 2 years ago. At the moment I got the message, I was about 1 mile from the university. Buck also indicated that there was probably no money involved but I might at least want to have a beer with him. I figured the coincidence was too great to pass up. Fate had put me in a position to help these guys so I might as well do it. I decided to call them in the morning and arrange something.

After a Doner Kebab at "The Kebab Kid" (I expected lamb, pineapple, and tomatoes on a spear but instead got them in peta with lots of sour cream - yummy), we went back to the motel and Joan got out the Newton to start emails. I went on a walk to let her go undisturbed.

Even after dinner I was still a little hungry. I'm am almost always hungry these days. I found out at Paul and Margo's that I weigh only 10 stone - 140 pounds! That's 25 pounds less than I weighed in May and probably the least I have weighed since 1992! It feels great I can tell you. I eat anything and everything I want. Margo was actually worried I wasn't eating enough. People are calling me skinny. Normally if I was still hungry after dinner, I would ignore the feeling (or have a beer) but during the walk I stopped at a rolling diner in a trailer parked along Broadway Street in a part of Auckland called New Market. I ordered a toasted tomato sandwich and asked the guy if they moved to different parts of town every week or what. He said the trailer had been at that same corner for 51 years! I bet that is longer than 95% of the business in the buildings in New Market.

When I got back to our hotel, Joan had just finished her 4th game of Mahjong so I got out the walkman that we carry around (and rarely use) and a cassette of Beethoven's 1st and 4th piano concertoes and went for another walk. You get a little music starved on these bike trips and when you do get a chance to listen to your favorite stuff it really sounds good. So I enjoyed a rather nice evening stroll while Joan slaved on the computer.

The next morning I called Dean Robinson from the University of Auckland Medical School and arranged to meet with him. They were doing some sort of experiment with respitory brain cells - the ones that remind you to breath every few seconds I think. In a nutshell, he used a computer and the software I worked on to monitor the electrical impulses from the cells. I was hoping to fix his software problem with a few clicks of the mouse but no such luck. He had found a deep rooted bug in the software that would require a lot of software tools, a lot of time, and a lot of money to fix. None of which were available. It took a couple hours to figure that out and verify it. We discussed a few work-arounds though and even did a successful preliminary test of one. The whole time I kept thinking, "here I am in Auckland helping a guy study respitory brain cells. An odd thing, this."

I wasn't the hero I thought fate had destined me to be and I didn't earn any money but there was good will all around and now part of my trip can be tax deductible.

next: Next: the Coromandel Peninsula

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