Raglan

Last weekend we took advantage of Rob's 4 day weekend from work and drove south ~ 2 hours to Raglan.  It is a small surf town on the west coast (black sand!).  This is a picture of Mount Karioi from the Whaingaroa Harbour.

We stayed at the Kopua Holiday Park, which sits on a peninsula within the harbour.  There was a small Pedestrian bridge to walk to town.  Here is our camping set up.  Big tent, the table with little benches and our paddle boards.  This campground did not have a pool, so it was a little easier to get the kids out into nature.  There was a soccer pitch right beside the campground, so Jonah and Dad did have some shootouts.

We had seen pictures of Raglan ahead of time and noticed these really cool rocks that people would kayak or paddleboard to, but we couldn't find exactly where they were on any website.  Well that's because they are right in the harbour.  They are called the pancake rocks and they run all the way along the north shore of the harbour.

We spent a couple hours the first day paddling around, in-between and under the rocks.  When you got close and looked in the cracks, there were hundreds of little crabs!  Very cool experience.

The next day we went surfing and boogie boarding at Ngarunui Beach.  It was pretty windy, so the surf was challenging.  

The rest of the afternoon was pretty wet, so we drove to a short hike to Bridal Veil Falls.  They actually do look like a bridal veil.  This was the most impressive waterfall we have seen in NZ so far.

The last day we drove to the Te Toto Gorge and hiked up Mt Karioi.

It was pretty wet and muddy from the rain the day before, so we needed some incentive to get to our destination...Pringles and Squirmies (sour worm candies that we have come to enjoy in NZ).  Sadly we have not found Twizzlers here and it is one of the few treats we miss from back home.

After supper that evening we took a walk into town and got ice cream!  The kids are getting very good at spotting TipTop signs.  The next day we packed up and headed home.  Had to catch up on homework for skipping 2 days of school.

Woods Kids off to the Races

We've had a couple of 'routine weeks' back in Auckland. The kids have school, dance practice, 'football' practices and games.  Erin has already put in many kilometers on her road bike and is enjoying (and challenged) by her early morning all men ride group.  She is working towards a road race in February.  Rob is training with the North Harbour Triathlon Club with the hopes of completing his first triathlon in March.  The Club has started swim bike run sessions on Saturday mornings, starting with ocean swimming.  This is Rob's first real ocean swimming experience.  He has seen (and been stung by) several jellyfish and saw a stingray!  Shockingly it is his nose that seems to get stung the most...who would have thought.

It is springtime here now, and the 'race season' has begun.  Every night there is some running series that you can participate in.  The one that is easiest for us is Beach Series because it runs out of Takapuna Beach just down the street from the apartment.  There are running, ocean swimming and stand-up paddleboard races of varying distances.  Week one was Tuesday last week.  Jonah did the 2.5km beach run and got 3rd place out of 91 participants!

Rob had quite the adventure on the coastal run.  It was made very clear that the course could involve getting wet depending on the tide.  Well we were only a couple hours off of high tide and Rob got soaked!  For portions of the run he had to swim in neck deep water!  Maybe that was why there were only 24 people competing.  It was a true kiwi experience.

Over the weekend, the kids participated in a Kids Duathlon at Bayswater School.  It was a slick event with 'heaps' (the kiwi word for 'loads' or 'lots') of kids participating.  What a great event for a school fundraiser.  The format was run, bike, run.  The kids did great!  Once again, Naysa was the fastest girl in a running race.  Those long legs are fast.

Well, hopefully the forecast is wrong as we are planning to go camping in Raglan this weekend and it is supposed to rain!

Celebrating Jonah!

Well our young boy is now 11!  Jonah celebrated his birthday with his favourite meal prepared by Mom: lasagne and garlic bread with apple pie and ice cream for dessert!  He used the money he received from many relatives to buy an All Blacks Jersey - Maori edition.  Aunt Ann and Uncle Michael were in town later that week and took us all out for supper to TokTok.  TokTok is just up the street from us; it is always busy and we can smell the food every time we walk past it. It tasted as good as it smelled and we had a lovely evening.  His other request was the Zoo.  The highlight were the Siamang Gibbon.  They have a special throat sac than can take in air for howling. Quite entertaining for us.  Naysa did her best impression of the Siamang to get Jonah smiling for this picture.

 

Happy Birthday Jonah!  Our boy who is always up for an adventure with a smile on his face...we love you!  The following are all videos which would need a computer (not a iphone or ipad) to see.

Visitors from Australia

We had the pleasure of hosting Erin's Uncle Michel (Michael) and Auntie Ann.  The last time we saw them was the summer of 2008 in Saskatoon when Jonah was a chatty toddler and Naysa was about to enter into the world.  We spent the weekend walking on the beach, swimming in the pool, checking out the zoo, attending a cultural evening fundraiser at the school (complete with fire dancers) and eating some nice meals.  It was great to see them.  After the weekend, they made their way north to the Bay of Islands.  We'll see them again in a few weeks before they head back to Australia.  We are planning to visit them in Byron Bay in April 2017.

Lake Taupo and the Waikato River

We recently returned from a 4 day trip to Lake Taupo, and we did our first kiwi camping.  We bought a big tent, a small camping stove and a 'camping table and benches' because there are very few picnic tables at camping sites in NZ.  The campground had showers, a kitchen to cook in, trampolines, playgrounds, 'bouncing pillows' (see Naysa below), sport courts, etc.

The campground we stayed in was the Lake Taupo Top 10 Holiday Park.  If you actually want to go out and explore nature, do NOT take your kids here.  You will never get them to leave the pool!  There was a bar/kitchen like in a Caribbean resort, it was really warm (almost hot tub warm), and a really cool Grotto cave with a treasure chest 4m deep to challenge the kids to swim to the bottom of the pool.  They also had a massive movie screen and played a movie everyday at 5pm.  We could have spent the entire day at the pool every day and the kids would have thought it was the best holiday ever!

Once we managed to convince the kids to leave the campground we did check out some cool outside adventures.  We did a mountain bike ride called W2K track and Headland Loop.  We drove about 20 minutes to nearby Kinloch and biked up a very well maintained track to some incredible views of Lake Taupo.

The next day we hiked the Craters of the Moon geothermal park...

...and checked out Huka Falls on the Waikato River.  We learned that the dams on Waikato River supply 15% of New Zealand's power!  

On our last day in Taupo we took a guided kayaking trip on the Waikato River to 'the Squeeze'.  Apparently it was featured on the bachelorette.  Our guide called it 'New Zealand's most famous secret'.  The area where we kayaked was a very active geothermal zone.  Several little pockets of water were quite hot.  We were told specifically not to get out of our kayaks as we could have burned our feet!

The squeeze trip was supposed to end in a 'hot flowing water fall'.  Our guide said, 'well it's warmer than cold'.  I guess it had rained for a couple of days prior in the area, so the water was cooler than usual.  The poorly insulated Naysa shivered her way through, but in the end I think all the kids remember was how cool it was to sneak our way through the narrow gap in the cliff to a cool waterfall.

It was a short paddle to our pick up spot.  Good thing we had double kayaks...the Snoop would not have made it!