Miserable Weather, Nice Time
Posted by Anita Sat, 27 May 2006 05:31:00 GMT
Jack and I have just had a week long holiday. The timing couldn’t really have been better. Jack had just finished a shut-down at the refinery, for which he had to work quite long hours, and I had am only a week away from finishing my placement at northland pathology. I think somewhere along the line we managed to anger the holiday gods because the first thing that happened was that Jack got sick. Not life-or-death sick, but sick enough to make him fairly unhappy about it all. Well we had planned to visit my family in Tauranga and if Jack was going to be sick, it might as well be there.
On the way we stopped off at a place called Miranda. If you haven’t heard of it don’t worry I don’t imagine you are the only one. Miranda is located in the firth of Thames and has an interesting shoreline. It is comprised of an extensive shell bank, also known as a chenier plain. Interestingly there are very few places in the world with this type of geology and it makes it a very attractive place for shore birds to come and nest.
There is a little hut that you can walk out to and hide so you can watch these birds coming in with the tide.
As you can see the first day of our holiday wasn’t all bad, although it had already been raining quite a bit.
It turned out that our visit to Tauranga was a timely one indeed. We managed to turn up the day before the little brothers birthday feast. I know I’m a terrible sister for not knowing Seans birthday. Every year I think its on the 30th and every year Im about 10 days out. Luckily at 16 Sean feels that he’s grown out of birthay presents.Unfortunatly at 24 I haven’t - still its better late than never isn’t it? It really was a bit of a treat to turn up home and have both grandparents an aunt and a cousin show up for a delicious roast dinner. Also it was great to see how the farm that Mum and Dad are leasing from Grandma was coming along. Its especially cool to be able to check up on the flaxes I helped plant. It certainly seems they’ve got their hands full with cows, steer, the rogue bull and the complaints department. Poor dad is being haunted by the foghorn, (whom I secretly refer to as Foghorn-Leghorn. Isay, Isay, boy!)a steer who bellows at him the moment he sees him, even if he is up the other end of the valley.
During our stay the weather progressively worsened with a heavy rain warning being issued on our last day.
We left on Thursday to go over the Kaimai ranges to Hamilton to see Jacks sister Alison and her little bundle of joy Fergus. About 2/3 the way up the Kaimais is a fantastic park that I always love to stop in to see, called McLarens Falls Park.
In autumn it is even more fantastic as many of the trees explode with colour.
Here we got a little complacent. As it hadn’t rained too much for a while we went for a little walk around only to be caught in the rain and have to run back dripping and puffing to the car.
Eventualy we got to Hamilton, we had even dried off by then. There we had a lovely time Hnging out with Alison and fussing over Fergus (who just happens to be sooo cute).
Later that night Maxine and Doug arrived for a visit(Jacks parents), back in the country after a week in the bright lights of Sydney.
Then the next day we were off again, this time in the direction of home. We stopped for the night in auckland to catch a show that was a part of the comedy festival, “From India With Love”.
