Saturday 27th to Sunday 28th October – Trip to Mount Maunganui

Saturday 27^th October – Shihad Gig

Our new neighbour - thrush - hopefully better luck the second time?

Last night went on later than planned. So after a lay-in, the gym and cleaning the house for the Edwards to stay in, we left later than planned.  It was only just over two-hours’ drive to Mount Maunganui. I reminded Simon that we had been there for a day out during our camper adventure at the end of January.  In fact, it was where we headed for a swim and to focus on doing some planning for the North Island, which we had failed to do up to that point! It was nice to have a reason to head back and spend some more time there, albeit the weather was nowhere near as warm as in January.

We checked into the Mission Belle Motel where we discovered that our room had an amazing view of the Mount itself (right). 

It was nearly 5pm by this time and the doors for the night’s gig were opening at 6pm – we went straight out as we needed to squeeze in some dinner and beers before then!  We caught an Uber to the Rising Tide which is the home of Mount Brewing co.  A perfect opportunity to order a taster tray to decide on our favourite tipple to continue the evening with.

This consisted of trawling through a very extensive list of brews (below), reading out their description and writing the number of our chosen drink on a taster tray. And voila! The appropriate five tiny glasses were delivered (left). 

The honey hussy was my favourite!

We also had tasty burgers for dinner and felt so comfortable that we enjoyed the 1^sthalf of the All Blacks Vs Wallabies whilst enjoying a couple of larger glasses of our favourites.

A good atmosphere brewing before the main band of the night...

Maybe we should’ve budged sooner. By the time we walked over to the arena Kora were already in full swing, meaning that we had missed the first band, Villainy, completely!  Kora were brilliant. The lead singer has an amazing voice and they have a kind of ska/funk vibe to their songs which makes them great live.  We were happy to find that Mount Brewing Co were supplying the beer to the event so we could continue where we had started. We managed to bag a spot right in front of the sound desk for the main band of the evening, Shihad.  This was the last night of their thirtieth anniversary reunion tour. They get played a lot on the Rock so we knew a few of their tracks

Shihad

They played pretty varied stuff because over the thirty years their albums have gone from what would probably be described as soft rock to a heavy grunge sound. There was a good atmosphere and we enjoyed hearing our favourite tracks. Taking a sneaky look outside, we saw that as predicted, the heavens had opened. We booked an Uber and made a dash for it before the rest of the masses also decided to leave.  We got the cab to drop us back in town for more beers and people watching, which was more entertaining than usual due to Halloween fancy dress efforts.

Mount Maunganui looms in the background...

Sunday 28^th October – Mount Maunganui

Thankfully, last night’s rain had been blown away and we woke to a nice day. Checking out of our motel, we parked as near as we could to climb the mount (right).

Now that looks like a good beach-side campsite

Yellowhammer

It was estimated to take an hour to climb, but even doing it at Simon’s pace we reached the summit in 45 minutes.



I was very proud of us both.

There were loads of tuis, yellowhammers and lots of other birdlife on the mountain.

A tui reaching for some nectar

Stunning view from the summit

Someone even took their own paragliding gear on the climb with them before throwing themselves off the summit:

View of Matakana Island from the north western side of the summit

View down to the road where we'd left the car and the hot pools for our recovery!

We took it easy on the way back, getting views from all sides of the mount as we corkscrewed our way downwards.  We strolled onto the seafront for a well-deserved brunch. Still feeling very full, we treated ourselves to a relaxing dip in the hot pools we’d seen earlier from the mountain side (right).

Mount Maunganui main beach

We’d had such a lovely 24 hours there, and all only just over two hours away. We took the long route home, but I think we’d enjoyed better scenery on the more direct route over on Saturday. The trouble with having such a good weekend? The time disappeared really fast and we both found ourselves suffering from Sunday night blues…..

Monday 15th to Friday 26th October - cute bird videos, skeletons and darts

A very young tui...

Monday 15^th October – Bird Rescue

Busy as ever, especially with some real young chicks. Look at these Tui babies. Aren’t they ugly but cute in a vulnerable way?!

And then there’s a rare star at the moment – a stilt chick, in this incubator with a couple of plover chicks.

It was a glorious day so it would have been wrong to be stuck inside at the gym. Instead, I rang Simon at work and managed to persuade him to accompany me for an early evening stroll.  We went to re-visit the Whangamarino walkway as it’s only a short walk but gives you good views and a little bit of culture at the same time! I won’t repeat the photos that are already on the blog, but there were some pretty purple flowers in the area (left).

Tuesday 16^th October – Gig tickets

Carrying on with one of our usual favourite pastimes, it seems that some decent bands are coming to these shores soon.  With my extra little bit of income we have secured tickets to a few shows in 2019.  It seems easier to get tickets in New Zealand – another bonus to lower population numbers!

Wednesday 17^th October – Hunua Ranges

Another straight forward day in the ranges this week doing some more pest control off a main track, so no new and exciting things to report.

Thursday 18^th to Sunday 21^st October – SPCA

It’s the first Bank Holiday here for months, Labour Day on Monday. It’s great that Simon has a long weekend having had a really tough week at work. And he gets to spend the majority of the weekend relaxing alone as I’m at the SPCA… bonus!

The weather has turned up for everyone going away for the weekend. The roads will be rammed. We’re looking forwards to experiencing our first summer here. I worry whether Simon is happy with his new job. It seems like most days he barely has time to make cups of coffee (and he lives on coffee!), so it’s pretty stressful. I hope it’s worth it in the end and he will have gained valuable experience and qualifications for his CV, that will then make it possible for him to find a job he really wants. Two years isn’t that long, right?

Being on the phones at the SPCA has given me a handy reminder of how impossible and stupid the public can be! Don’t get me wrong, there are some lovely grateful callers, but they seem to be outnumbered by the unexpected and grumpy ones!  I was told that I’m completely useless yesterday – for refusing to get a cat collected that sounded like he was having a nice snooze on a compost heap, but the caller was convinced that it had been abandoned.  Then I had the woman who asked me advice for a long journey that her dog has to do for the first time – a six-hour bus journey.... in Peru! I was convinced that call was a set-up.

Whatever I think of the part-time job, it’s spurring me on to look at other options and think what I would like to do. I get on well with my colleagues, however, working full time here isn’t something I want to find myself doing.

Wednesday 24^th October

In the Hunuas today we just did a repeat of last week. But this time we had the added annoyance of swarms of flies around the traps. They appeared to be the only living beings that were grateful for us placing rabbit meat in the traps. Not a single other thing was caught in any of the traps I checked. Thinking positive, this may be because the 1080 has done its job and there is nothing to catch.  But it felt like a complete waste of time, so I hope we can get involved with some different activities soon.  I was back from my route first and, having waited an hour with another volunteer for anyone else to appear we decided to be antisocial and left!  It seemed like a good opportunity. I had already decided that I would head over to Waitawa Park to do this month’s Pied Shag count, so finishing early was an unexpected bonus.

Over at Waitawa it was another stunning day (above). Gemma the ranger had spent 4 hours on Tuesday clearing all of the rubbish from the park after the long weekend, some peoples’ answer to the lack of bins instead of what they’re supposed to do - take their rubbish home.  During the clean-up she had found another victim of fishing line.

You can see the metal around the poor bird's throat

I need to keep a note of how many birds are being found like this.  I spent my hour studying the tree and trying to view the birds from closer angles.  I managed to find some nests I hadn’t seen before and saw three fledglings peeking over the sides of different nests.

Not a bad view for an hour... the pied shag tree from the deck of the bach

As I left the park I received a call from Simon. He had done a recorded interview for Thane and Dunc from The Rock afternoon drive show after he text them last week. They had been talking about a rugby player who’d suffered an ugly injury to his private parts but continued on, after getting his testicles glued back together at half time – a true Battler! Simon had text them about the time that Police Dog Studs bit a burglar in his privates causing a similar injury!  Now he was going to be on the radio at 410pm this afternoon talking about it! Even better, as a result, he was offered tickets for a gig this Saturday – in Mount Maunganui!  I pointed out that we were supposed to be going to his work do and had the Edwards staying with us that night. Something we’ve had planned for months. Simon made a couple of calls and it was agreed that we shouldn’t waste an opportunity to enjoy some free gig tickets. There will be other work dos and we will be catching up with the Edwards again soon. So, we’re off for the weekend!

Unexpected view in the car next to us!

Friday 26^th October

We didn’t want a particularly late one, but it would be remiss not to pop to the Kellas’s for at least one night on the weekend.  It looks like Halloween had arrived early in this car parked at our local petrol station en-route..




















Steve and Huihana had heard of the Brewers bar we are going to for the gig tomorrow night, in fact it turns out that they have some memorabilia from said bar, made by Steve’s Dad who lives over that way (left).  I may not have been on top form when it came to scoring that night, much to my teammate’s dismay, but take a look at this grouping (above right)!