In our years living in California we've done a few long driving trips around the West, including a grand loop from San Francisco to San Diego to Phoenix and back to SF via the Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, as well as ten days meandering up to Seattle and back, so the prospect of doing something similar here didn't faze us, especially as a change of pace from our uninterrupted month-long stay in Buenos Aires. And it's worked out great - we've gotten to see huge chunks of both islands, even without trying to see and do everything it's possible to do here.
To prove how far we've gone, the photo above is from Cape Reinga, at the very northern tip of the North Island and the northernmost point of the country. We visited there the other day after spending the night at, of all places, a golf resort on the Karikari Peninsula just to the south (owned by a guy repeatedly referred to as "reclusive American billionaire Paul Kelly" who turns out to be a Wharton grad and Penn trustee). This was the view from the heavily discounted villa where we spent the night:
Much like our drives around the American West, it's been an endless series of picture postcard views. Every hillcrest you cross is another spectacular sweeping view across the landscape to distant mountains or the distant sea or those amazing green hills dotted with livestock which you saw in all the Shire scenes of the Lord of the Riongs movies. "Scenic vista" long ago became our joking shorthand for "holy shit, that's one impressive view," one we would repeat to each other several times an hour on our drives up and down the equally spectacular Pacific Coast Highway. Well, we've reached overload on the use of the phrase in the past couple of weeks. Just the lighthouse and the seascape around Cape Reinga alone qualified:
Look at the wave action here - this is where the currents from the Tasman Sea to the West (coming from the left of the frame) cross the currents from the Pacific at nearly a perfect right angle (coming from the right) just below the lighthouse, crashing into each other with enormous power before devolving into rips and whirlpools that look like they could suck a supertanker under:

Just a couple kilometers south of here is the northern end of the west shore's 90 Mile Beach, and the massive sand dunes at Te Paki:
You can't see her, but Eileen's sitting in one of cars down there while I'm slogging up the dunes:
And a couple hours south of here were the towns of Opononi & Omapere, where we spent the following night. So these postcards were all in one day's drive. And I could have taken many more pictures than I did along the way: