Farewell to NZ
Farewell to NZ again.
Jen having spent hours on the phone to Air New Zealand from the south island managed to get us “free” flights up to Tauranga using our existing round the world tickets. These tickets allow you, lets say, 40,000 kms and you must go in an easterly direction. This allows you to muck around with the dates at no cost, but if you change the routing then a service charge applies.
Back into Tauranga to say cheerio to Doug, Ange and weans for 5 nights. One of the musts for adults and weans alike was to get down to Rotorua to go the Luge. As you can see in the pics it's a concrete dodgems track down through the trees, then jump on a chairlift to get back for another hurl.
With a choice of three tracks, you can quickly convince yourself that full speed down the advanced is too easy, so lets try single handed quickly followed by a pirates eye -patch. This obviously builds until you try backwards in the cart, over the edge. A splendid morning's racing was had with bumping and cutting the competition off at the bends - perfectly gentlemanly conduct. I would have to admit that having a 120% weight advantage over the weans did have a small benefit. Who would like to see one in Scotland, I have a site in mind, a wee project for the return?
We managed to borrow a house out at Waihi Beach and took the 6 weans out for 2/3 days. The beach is 10kms long and gets a real pounding by the surf, but still safe enough to get thrown about in the waves. A grand fort was constructed with two defence walls to keep the high tide out, and bedecked in shells as a warning to the sea as to the quality of its construction. Some of us went down at 22.00 to inspect the high tide and got soaked through in the rain. All sound. Back at 08.30 and not so sound. Outer wall breached, well not there actually, but the inner wall intact, 1 All.
Jack the human fly actually manged to extricate himself from the 1 ton pile before the tide came in.
A good couple of days with the cousins before they went back to school. Jack and Kate were very disappointed not to be going back too?? It's too bad there is 12,000miles between Scotland and NZ
as the cousins do get on very well, even with the large time lapses between visits that are inevitable.
New territory beckons, Fiji in the wet season................
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