Gisborne..

Our time in Auckland flew by! Catching up with friends and family and sorting things like car, banking, phones made for busy days. Luca spent time with my Mum and Dad while we did all the mundane things, and had an absolute blast.

This was our last afternoon/evening spent with my brother and his family.

Luca loved the flying fox in the playground! You would be hard pressed to find this in Canada for litigation reasons. Comparing to Costa Rica, where there is really no codes for things like this, and remembering how ridiculously over the top codes were for building playgrounds in Canada, NZ seems to have struck a nice balance in the middle there 🙂

Suddenly we found ourselves at the end of the first week and it was time to head to Gisborne. We drove down through the Karangahake Gorge, one of my favorite places in NZ, and stopped for a walk. So many cool hikes through there we need to go back!

We made it to “Brian the Bach”, our home for the week, late afternoon and it is SUCH a sweet place.

The beach is across the road about a 100 meters away, perfect!

We could all feel our stress levels coming down. I think the shock of being in 2 big cites for 2 weeks after coming down from our quiet little mountain town, as well as the jet lag, was a bit much for us all. Gizzy is a quiet little town on the east coast of the north island, the first in the world to see the sun each morning, it is like a bit of a time warp, you feel like you are in the 1980’s, it is great!!!!! 🙂

Our car had started to make a clunking sound in Auckland and it kept getting worse so when we hit here we booked it in to be seen and we checked out the town. Library is always a must for Luca.

Here he is reading the iconic Kiwi cartoon, Footrot Flats.

The author, (Murray Ball), is from here, Wal and Dog are outside the library immortalized in bronze 🙂

It is cool that Luca gets to see first hand things I have told him about all his life 🙂

Murray Ball gifted the Te Kuri Walkway for the public to enjoy and we did that hike yesterday, it is spectacular. Such a wonderful thing for him to gift.

We walked up from the gully you see at the bottom

Luca loved the farm animals along the way….

and we generally all felt so much better, just being out there by ourselves doing what we love, it had been over 2 weeks since our last decent hike we were all getting a bit antsy 🙂

We made it home late, (the car by the way a relatively inexpensive fix thankfully!!), and had a BBQ, played some Spot It! , (thanks Auntie Jen!!) , and read, Stories of Witches and Wizards, (thanks Auntie Dawn for this one!!!!).

Today it is Farmers Market day, we are interested to see how things compare to Costa Rica on that front. The weather since we hit Gisborne has been truly spectacular, we really are seeing it at its best!