My last stop was a few days in Auckland, basically just waiting for my flight home. I hadn’t originally planned on spending any time there, but the only day that the flight was cheap was a few days earlier than I wanted. I had the impression Auckland was kind of lame from Matt and Dan, but ended up having a great time. I stayed in a decent hostel called friendz.com and immediately rediscovered the joys of traveling alone. Don’t get me wrong, I am so happy to have gotten to spend almost a month with Matt and Dan, and nothing beats some solid time with good friends. But after a long period of being around only the same people you can use a break. Being 3 kind of nerdy smelly guys on motorcycles, we didn’t really end up meeting people at all. Many of them meet on the backpacker buses or at the touristy attractions which we avoided entirely, and while we made some passing conversation with people at hostels, nobody approaches a group of 3 dudes and a group of 3 is too large to approach other groups. When you are alone, you end up meeting people very quickly, and often end up in much more interesting situations that you couldn’t and wouldn’t otherwise. So I met some cool people and had fun. The first night a really cool girl from Munich although she left the next day. Then I ended up going to an Erykah Badu CD release party which was the only thing I found online that caught my eye. I got a free copy of the cd because I was one of few people that actually came because I was a Badu fan, and met a really sweet dude who is a neurologist and a DJ and generally interesting guy. We hung out for a while and ended up sneaking into a big dubstep/drum’n'bass show. The music wasn’t great, but it was fun and he bought me lots of drinks since he’s a doctor and I live in a backpack. Thanks Jason! Then I hopped on a plane and headed back to the good ol’ US of A which I guess brings me back to the first post I made when I got here before this mad rush of blogtastic glory. I guess I’ll probably write one final entry to kind of wrap things up but that can wait until I get home to Maryland. So, if you’re actually reading this still, and I doubt too many people are, then thanks for following my journey and I really hope you enjoyed it. More fun stuff is yet to come!