Hey Utah, its not snowing in Auckland and the water is warm enough for a quick 2km swim after walking Isaac to the bus stop. Jenn and Nikolas are on a school field trip to Goat Island for snorkeling. The curriculum here just rocks. And even better, the principal sent home a letter discussing the pros and cons of homework and said it is not compulsory, especially if it results in kid / family stress that is counterproductive to learning. Meanwhile Nik's peers at Edith Bowen Lab School are learning about Father Escalante and Utah history...and he's off blowing bubbles and looking at fish :)

P.S. Nik does read about 50 pages of Harry Potter / night, composes stories, and plays math games. I'm OK with schoolwork staying at school.

Pete, Rachel, and Amelia

Oh we are having the best time now that Pete, Rachel and their beautiful 16 month old daughter Amelia are here. Life is good, especially to see them. We've been friends with Pete and Rachel for years (decades in Pete's case), and we immediately fell in love with their beautiful daughter. Oh it couldn't be helped. She's got the cutest little smile and dimple... and she's so bright.. and a great dancer too! (I might be showing my biases at this point). Watching the three kids do a haka last night was hilarious. I'll have to get a copy of it from Rachel's camera.


Here are just a few of the pictures...



Hiking over to Oneroa, with Isaac pushing the stroller (and Uncle Pete helping up the hill)...

















Oneroa beach at low tide, on our way to Little Oneroa beach.....
















Pete making flying the stunt kite look so easy....














Sleeping babies are especially cute.




















Having fun on the slide at Little Oneroa Beach...

Ouch!

Last Thursday I managed to high center our car... on a guard rail that was supposed to keep me from dropping off a cliff! Well, I didn't drop off entirely, so I guess it did its job. It still took a long time to extricate the car from that spot, though. I was over at a friend's house, picking up a stroller, and he had a driveway that I really shouldn't have attempted to drive down. To get back out, I was supposed to back up a very steep and very, very, very narrow driveway, all in reverse, high speed, blind corner, and onto a highway. That's the way the residents do it. I didn't know that, though, and I thought I would try to do 126-point turn around at the bottom and go out front wards. I couldn't see the front left wheel, so I asked Isaac to get out of the car and watch it for me. Well... I didn't make it. In hind sight I should have assumed that Rudy, because he lived there, would be able to get my car out of their driveway, and just asked him to drive it for me. As it was, my engine block was stuck on a guard rail, one wheel on the driveway, two wheels on a landing below, and one wheel free, ready to have its tire changed if I wanted. Oh, and the driveway was blocked. Oh well. Nobody got hurt, and the car is even all right, so all's well that ends well.


Then Friday, Dave broke his foot windsurfing. Ouch! His feet were in the foot straps, he jumped, and took a hard landing, where the board (and his left foot) stopped suddenly and the rest of Dave's body didn't. Imagine taking your toes and the ball of your foot, and bending it back yards.














Oh, and a word on Kiwi customer service. I love it... It's phenomenal, very friendly and sincere.. That is... when you can get it at all. Unfortunately, my car was in a pickle Thursday evening at about 5:45 pm. The phone number for the towing truck company was out of service, I tried three different numbers for AA (the NZ version of AAA), and not only was there no answer, but not even an answering machine. I did manage to get hold of a mechanic at home, who paged his towing truck person, but they never got back to me. After several hours of waiting, and realizing that there was no towing truck coming that night, I put the hazard lights on and got a ride home with Rudy. Dave biked over the next morning (about 8:30) and it took until about noon to get the car out. Then Dave's foot. I first took him over to the local hospital, where we found out that the foot was probably broken, but there wasn't an X-ray machine on the island that day to assess the real damage. (Apparently, there is only an X-ray machine every other weekday). So to get an X-ray, which the local doctor recommended, he needed to take the next ferry over to Auckland and then take a cab to the hospital. They put him in a temporary cast, gave him some crutches, and I drove him home so he could shower and rinse the salt water off before the ferry. I insisted that he get to the ferry pretty early (like 7 whole minutes!), even though Dave hates showing up early and is even known to jump on the ferry while it was pulling away. (I begged him not to try it with crutches though). So anyway, the good news is, that after 20 hours since breaking his foot, we learned that his foot is merely broken, but it doesn't require any surgery. Yay!

Ah well. It sure looked like he was having fun before the accident. Check out the video! It was a fast day at Surfdale.

Whanganui

Kayaking the Whanganui was incredible! Of course, I love these friends, so just hanging out would have been a blast, but add adrenaline rush rapids (ok, it doesn't take much white water to get my heart rate up, but this was great!) and then! when the water was placid, to look up and realize that you were in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Wow. Well, it was amazing. Fantastic weekend.

Isaac's Birthday Beach Party

Happy happy birthday to my big 7 year old! We love you! We had a great time celebrating his special day at the beach (oh, I could get used to this beach party thing). It was great fun for the kids and parents.

Isaac requested a pineapple upside cake, which was the cake my mom always made for my birthdays; Whew! I'm glad he wanted a cake I knew how to make, and this one turned out especially good! It was way too windy to light the candles (oh, we tried, but couldn't do it), but he did get to blow out the big "7" candle. Actually, while we were cleaning up, we noticed the seagulls had all started in on the cake, so no left overs there.














Going after the "Dickey Moe" pinata with a cricket bat and a grocery bag as a blind fold. This was probably the highlight for the kids as they all took turns going after it, although Dave and I wondered if we really should be encouraging to kids to hit a whale as hard as they could. Oh well. Dickey Moe was one tough whale, and it took a big 13 year brother to finally whack it hard enough to break it. (This pinata was built and re-enforced by engineers).










One final thing. The day started out windy! (Check out the video). Dave took a few hours break for wind surfing. It had to be done! I thought we might need to move the party to our house, but Little Oneroa was protected and by evening it had calmed down to breezy.

¡Isaac's Birthday Piñata!

Jenn and kids built an incredible piñata for Isaac's 7th birthday--Dad added the harpoons. The result: "Dickey Moe" (aka "Moby Dick")

We are having a birthday bash at Little Oneroa beach tomorrow, where the kids will be blindfolded as little Captain Ahabs and go at the whale with a woodn leg, or cricket bat, whichever is available.

What's in a name?

You have to love the names of some of the places here. Here a few doozies.

Whakatane (pronounced Fock-a-tawn-ee)
On my East Cape Trip with the girls, we had a marvelous time, and one of our stops was Whakatane. The first leg of the trip, I was in the back seat in the car, and I heard my friends and navigators up front say "We are going to Whakatane". (ummm. we are going to what?)





Lake Tekapu (take-a-poo):
On the Routeburn Track, Dave told me that he hiked up to Tekapu. (huh?) Beautiful lake, and I guess yes, maybe it is even nicer than the bathrooms of the hut.





Whakenewha (Fock-n-A-fa)
This is a nice reserve on the island. Great for picnics, cricket, windsurfing, and flying kites. Dave just went windsurfing yesterday and came back with a huge grin. It was a Whakenewha day.








Finally, this weekend I'm very excited to be going on a river trip with some great friends on the Whanganui River. We put in a place called Pipiriki (pee pee reek-ee) and get picked up down river at Whakahoro (fock-a-whore-o).
Oooh, there's supposed to be some rapids at Pipiriki, but I'm not sure I want to go swimming in it. The guide book recommends pulling out at Whakahoro, because it might be more rapids than we can handle. OK, this I've got to see! :-)

Fun with Suspension Bridges

Before we left on the Routeburn, the kids did some trampoline bungie jumping at the mall, which was hot, but a lot of fun. Also, they had fun creating the following "cartoon clips" along the Routeburn. Enjoy!

Ninja jumping

We took a side trip outside of the Routeburn Flats Hut, where we needed to cross a stream bed several times and there were a few muddy areas we had to get over. The kids were really getting into the fancy ninja jumping it took to get over these areas....

Routeburn Hut to Hut: Days 4-5 (Finished!)

The rain fell hard during our second night at the Falls hut, but we had no precipitation on day 4 during our descent back to the Flats hut. We arrived to the greetings of our grandma-warden who wanted to know how her "Waiheke Kids" did on the hike. We were the first ones in the hut and picked the best bunks, then hiked up the side trail where we enjoyed open meadows and meandering streams (as well as a few baths in rock pools). After some dinner and games we enjoyed our last night on the trail and returned to the car the next day. We spent our last evening back at Kinloch Lodge, enjoying the lake, hot tub, and excellent food.

Then it was off to Lawrence, an old mining town where Justin conveniently owns an old house that provided a nice break as we made our way to Dunedin.