Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

Emily and Shona have been with us this week. They have done laundry, Sky Tower, read, Mission Bay, slept a lot, the cinema, Orewa, Wiawera (thermal pools) and almost finished the jigsaw. I was working at Hungry Creek on Monday modelling, and this is just 5 minutes up the road from the thermal pools at Wiawera. So, I roused the girls at 7am so that they could get organised before departing on the 1 hour drive up North. Claire, Emily and Shona spent the morning wallowing and then the afternoon being shown the sights round Orewa, Red Beach and Stanmore Bay by Claire. They kindly collected me at 4pm and E&S slept most of the way home while Claire drove and I acted as tour guide. On Tuesday evening E&S treated us to a night out at Bricklane, a local hostelry which it turned out served very good food (we had veg & meat platters with fries and wedges to share between us, then a couple of gooey desserts) prior to participating in the weekly pub quiz. We managed, with the help of th...

First of all, thank you to all of those of you who read this blog and email with comments. I am coming to realise that far more people are regular readers than I thought, and it is good to know that these words of mine are being read. Our biggest item of news this week is the arrival of Emily and Shona - Claire's friends from England. After visiting Hong Kong and having a two week tour of the South Island they arrived in Auckland on Thursday lunchtime. They are camping out in our "spare bedroom / office / ironing room". I think it would be true to say that they arrived a little jaded after seeing more of the South Island in two weeks than many of the inhabitants see in their lifetime's. So, sleep and laundry have been high on the agenda, though some shopping has been completed. Today, with both Nicky and Claire being at work I took them to the Waitekere Regional Park visitor centre and then onto Bethalls Beach where we had a lovely stroll in the wind and sun and didn...

As another fun packed week draws to a close I have to try and remember what we have done. It seems to have been mainly work for all of us. Claire has done an extra shift at Whitcoulls, I have done three MacOnSite jobs, and Nicky has been as busy as ever with her regular hours an emergency cover. However, we have managed a couple of good evenings out. On Wednesday we went to the Stardome in Cornwall Park. This is also where One Tree Hill is located. You may remember Nicky and I tackling it without extra oxygen when Sir Ed died. We had a wonderful time in their "planetarium" learning what we were seeing in the night sky about Auckland - the southern hemisphere basically. This was very informative because I knew that what looked like The Plough to me couldn't be The Plough because that is only visible in the northern hemisphere. I was very pleased to discover that it is actually the Southern Cross - the star cluster which appears on the New Zealand flag. We were also told wh...

First of all apologies to all you regular blog watchers. The problem is I tend to update the blog on a Sunday evening. It is the end of the week and we tend not to go out with Monday morning being just round the corner. However, last Sunday we were out - at the cinema with Steve and Ros and Lucy, Tim and Katie, to see Prince Caspian which most of us enjoyed. By the time we got home it was about half past eight and all we wanted to do was eat and go to bed. Now I know I could have updated the blog later in the week, but I was doing MacOnSite work Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and just didn't get round to it. The Monday and Thursday jobs were in town so I walked there after finishing work at Ubertec. A consequence of this has been discovering a coffee house chain called Esquires. They not only do very nice coffee, but also excellent chocolate and caramel muffins, bacon and egg pie and things called thimbles, which are small pastry delights and are wonderful. It is a good job I was doi...