New Zealand Roadtripping

Two friends and I were traveling via car in the North Island of New Zealand. We wanted to pass through the island to go from the west coast to the east coast.

It was my friend Marisa’s turn to drive. We all looked at the map and she decided on what seemed to be the shortest route to our destination.

We hopped in our Nissan Sentra and hit the road that led us into a mountain. After about 10 mins on this road the paved road turned to gravel. We didn't think too much about it because we thought the trip wouldn't last long.

About an hour after that, as we continued to go up the mountain on the gravel road, we realized we hadn't seen another car since we entered the mountain. Just then a construction truck came flying down the mountain going the opposite way. It was going so fast it shook our little economy car.

About two hours after passing the truck we finally made it down the other side of the mountain and back to civilization. We had finally reached our destination.

We looked at the map again to figure out why it took us so long when we thought the route would be definitely less than 3 hours long.

We finally put the pieces of the puzzle together and realized that the route we took had a perforated line and not a solid line on the map. We looked at legend of the map and perforated meant "unfinished road."

We all laughed and made an important note to ourselves, read the legends of maps!