This weekend we headed up to Napier as it was…..windy in Wellington! It apparently turned out not too bad in the city, but we headed away anyway. The drive was a bit of a nightmare as it felt like I was driving a mini metro, with a 12 metre kite on top, in a hurricane. Ciara said I looked like I was playing a game as I could never really relax totally. We decided to keep going anyway, and it was all good once we arrived just before dark and parked up by the beach.
Napier is very famous for it’s art deco buildings as the whole place was rebuilt after a devastating earthquake in 1931. Saturday was brilliant though as we managed to get our shorts and tshirts on, with our ‘jandals’ (flip flops) and have a game of mini golf. Unfortunately I couldn’t resist the MacPac outdoor’s sale either…
Unfortunately there’s a few places we’d like to go to that are around the same distance away but we reckoned it was just too far for a normal weekend. 300km takes a bit longer in the van, although you can’t drive that fast in NZ anyway.
Sometimes in NZ though it feels like you just can’t get away from the roots of some of the people that have emigrated out here :
This week we’ve moved to another house for the week as one of the girl’s sisters and nieces are up to stay. Its a nice change, and yet again someone we don’t know has been very accommodating. We can walk to the city within minutes, and have Mount Victoria literally on our doorstep so can go for some walks in the forest there, yet we’re right in the city centre. I’ve been a bit of a slacker though as Monday was great weather so I was bouldering on the beach with a friend, then went and found a cheap bike for me. We’re going to pick up the bikes at the weekend when we move back to the house, and we’re kicking off the wild weekend (!) by looking at glowworms in the Botanical Gardens. I may also go to a Laphroig whisky tasting on Thursday…