Meet Dougie!

Dear readers, we need to introduce you to an important member of our New Zealand adventures:  Dougie.
Somewhere in Patagonia, we decided that we would rent a camper-van for the New Zealand leg of our honeymoon adventures (probably inspired by Josh and Jocelyn, our dopplegangers whom we met in Torres del Paine).

Many of you may also know of our penchant for naming important inanimate objects in our life:  our computer Jose (named after the Best Buy employee that sold him to us), our garmin watch Chrissy (actually, it's the virtual training partner feature of the watch that we named Chrissy, after Chrissy Wellington, greatest female triathlete ever), our camelback daypack Little Guy, our tent Snorri (named in Iceland after some famous Icelandic reverend, because Amy thought the name was funny and appropriate for our tent), and our piece-of-sh*t rental car in Iceland Jo-Jo (named after the Icelandic word for glacier, Jokull... we think).  We fell in love with this car, which the rental place didn't even want to rent to us because, "it's really ugly" (we actually thought it was really cute... like the cars in Super-Mario Brothers).  We especially liked it's stunt maneuvers, like the famous 'high-speed stall' -- cruising along a major highway at 55-60 mph, and the car would inexplicably stall out... requiring rapid down-shifting for the gears to hopefully catch again before you lost all power.  We're pretty sure Jo-Jo joined Amy's old VW in the scrap-heap pile as soon as we left Iceland.
 

Meet Dougie!



Anyway, we were really excited to meet our camper-van and, of course, to name it.  To our great delight and surprise (and confirming that we were definitely with the right rental company, and not just because they were by far the cheapest we could find!), our camper-van came already named!  Painted on the driver and passenger side doors! 

Friends:  Meet Dougie!
  
 

Check out that Disco Ball!...
and Amy catching some zzz's.


Dougie is a 2005 Toyota HiAce, with a sleek black exterior emblazoned with the white ExploreMore logo.  He's got a healthy appetite for 91 octane unleaded petrol and has a slight fetish for small neon-colored Mazda-3's.  By day, he's a roomie passenger van, with 2 spacious seats up front, a CD-stereo system, and a lounge/couch in the back (now sporting a sweet disco ball we've outfitted him with and a beautiful matching green accent pillow we just added).    He also has two of the coolest toothbrush holders you've ever seen (also recent additions we've made).  By night, he turns into the honeymoon suite, with tinted windows for extra privacy.   His couch pulls out and becomes a comfy bed.  (He does not come equipped his own bathroom or running water... we opted not to go for the more expensive version with those features, on the theory that we're quite happy to leave our waste products behind once they leave our bodies, rather than taking them with us as we travel throughout the country).  He carries all the necessary kitchen goods in his ample storage space in the back, and with the 'summer combo' kit we added, he now has a cooler (or, here in NZ, a chilly-box), table, chairs, hammock and solar shower.   

Check out those
toothbrush holders!


 

Look at all that storage capacity!

  

By night:  the honeymoon suite!











Like all the other cars here in NZ, his steering wheel is on the right.  And yes, as you might expect, driving on the opposite side of the road has definitely provided us with a few early laughs and misadventures... but the funnier stuff happens because his wipers are where we'd expect his turn signals to be, and vice versa... especially when we realize too late that we're about to miss our turn and try to do anything too suddenly.  (Note to all NZ drivers:  If you see a large black van barreling towards you down the highway, and suddenly the brake lights come on and the wipers start beating feverishly back and forth -- and it's not raining -- get ready, because we're turning!).