Trip up North

While Logan and Linsley are sleeping, I will use the peace to catch up on our blog. I have already swept the floor and cleared the dishwasher, as it is impossible to do those while Logan is around. In fact, there are 2 brooms in this house, as he also wants to sweep while you are sweeping. Earlier this morning while I was trying to empty the dishwasher, I just managed to catch 2 plates as he 'helped' me take them out. So it was a quick end to that task at that time! As it is Monday Logan is at home today with us. Normally his other granny comes to stay with him every Monday and Friday, as he just goes to Kindercare Tues, Wed, and Thursdays.

On Saturday - the 17th December - we set off after breakfast, going north across the city and the bridge, and saw the headoffice of The Warehouse where Margi works just on the far side of the Bridge. We drove north for just over an hour through very pretty countryside. It is all very green, with lots of trees, and hundreds of tree ferns, all set on very hilly ground. Throughout the day there were rain showers, but each time we needed to get out of the car to walk around the rain stopped, so we were very lucky. We first went to a farmers market in a pretty little village called Matakana. Then on the way home we first stopped at a stall at a bee farm where they sell half a hundred things all made from honey. However, in the restaurant there where we had tea and scones, and the others had a pie and a burger with chips, there was no food prepared with honey at all, which we found strange. However there was honey flavoured icecream, and honey mead and wine.

After that the next stop was at another tiny village called Puhoi, which has a famous pub to which people drive the hour or so out from Auckland. The pub's walls are covered with banknotes from various countries, with many R10 and R20 notes among them. There was also a collection of caps, with a Springbok cap among them, and lovely old photos and farm equipment from the village's past. We had a drink there, then stopped at a cheese farm a little further on, but didn't buy anything at that shop/restaurant.

Later that afternoon, back in Auckland, we went to a couple of shops with A & M who needed to buy Christmas pressies for a few people. Many of their shops are open till midnight at this time of the year! There are lots of really nice shopping centres everywhere, and even late on a Saturday afternoon the roads are full of traffic.

On sunday we vacumed and tidied the house as there is no Mildred here. Logan 'helped' with the vacuming too, but he had a biscuit just afterwards which negated all we had just done. When Andy came back from the gym, and while Logan was still asleep, Margi took us to the Pakuranga library, which is not only open till 4pm every Saturday, but is also open every Sunday! It is also a beautiful library, nicely set up, and also with lots of comfy chairs in which to just sit down and read a while. Every library we have seen has many shelves filled with Chinese books too. At least I am assuming they are Chinese because of the large numbers of Chinese who live here, but there are also very many other Asian people here, so they may be in any one of those languages. If anybody thinks New Zealand is full of shiny white people they will be seriously disappointed when they get here!

Later in the afternoon we set off to Mt Eden to do a geocache in that area. This is one of the 27 or so volcanoes in Auckland, and it has the most beautiful views over the entire city from the top. It was still very cloudy so unfortunately our photos are not too good. The geocache was in a park a suburb or so away, and we had some hot chips and American style corn dogs there, and then we had boerewors and salad for supper. Linsley had seen the boerewors in the supermarket the day before, so made sure he bought some!