Summer Holidays: The Finale

We were blessed to have a third leg of our summer holiday this year with Nic and Kim coming to visit us in Wellington for a few days.

In true Wellington fashion, we managed to put on one of the windiest days ever in Wellington on their first day here. I took Kim out for a walk (or should that be a struggle?) around my usual exercise route. I kept saying 'this is extreme even for Wellington', as the day coincided with rubbish day and there were bins tipped over and rubbish all flying through the air around us. We rescued a few bins on the route, securing what we could, with me despairing as to why people would put out the recycling skips without weighting them down somehow!

We decided a cafe lunch inside would be a good plan so took them to one of our new favourite spots Chocolate Fish Cafe where Nic duly declared the 'award for the best corn fritter with minted yoghurt, chilli jam and spinach on toasted rye bread sandwich' to Chocolate Fish Cafe.

The kids enjoyed riding around on the bikes and scooters outside where it was slightly sheltered from the wind. We then drove out to the South Coast but didn't last long because even there the wind was crazy strong.

In the end, we retreated to Te Papa to show Nic and Kim some of the cool displays there. The gingerbread house was still there, and we enjoyed walking all over the interactive map of NZ, showing them the earthquake house, the Discovery Centre, and the boy's favourite, the pebble pit.

After dinner, we even broke out our chocolate fondue set for the first time in about 3 years!

The wind gusts on Wednesday night got up to 120 km/hr, at one point I thought the house was going to lift off, but just as soon as it had come, it was gone, and we decided to take Nic and Kim up to the Makara wind farm, to see how we actually put our crazy, strong wind to good use.

The boys and Kim enjoyed jumping over the shadow of the wind turbine as it moved around us on the ground like a skipping rope.

The sun had a very cool rainbow ring around it, put especially there that day for Kim we think (she loves rainbows!).

 

This time, we decided to walk a bit further to the gun emplacements and scored ourselves a very cool view of the South Island. Seen here are everyone concentrating hard on where they were walking as we tried to avoid the millions of sheep poo all over the ground.

We counted 48 (or maybe 47 depending on who was counting!) wind turbines all over the hills about us.

And what a view awaited over yonder hill.

All the way to the South Island.  We grabbed at the opportunity of having another photographer on board to snap these family pics. Someone is looking a little tired in these pics, little did we know the chickenpox were about to rear their ugly head within 2 days.

Love this pic of my gorgeous bro and sister. We feel so blessed that they made the effort to come and visit our little part of the world, and we sure wish the thousands of miles of ocean between us could just disappear.

Loved being able to see all the way over to the South Island, never a given in the land of the long white cloud.

The abandoned shack enroute made for some fun shots.

And the kissing gate (aka stile) made for another stolen moment.

On our last day together we went out to Pirates Cove and played mini golf. Nic and Mark were neck and neck for most of the course, with Nic pulling out a 3-shot win on the back 9 holes.

Then we tiki toured back to Petone for lunch, although Mark then made the call to drive all the way round to Chocolate Days Cafe at Days Bay for lunch. Let's just say I wasn't best pleased with this plan and got a bit 'dark' to coin a Nic/Kim-ism, as parking was non existent, the cafe was super busy and we didn't end up eating till close to 2pm. Anyhow, all's well that ends well.

We'd booked up weeks in advance to take Nic and Kim to see The Hobbit one of the nights they were with us, but the other nights we made the most of having a foursome to play their favourite game, and our new addiction, DOG.

This is a very cool game from Germany that Nic's Swiss-German friends in Sydney introduced him to. It's a cross between UNO and LUDO and you play in pairs. It is very easy to pick up and only takes about half an hour max to play a round. In the early stages, Kim and I were winning 4-0 but over the course of the next few nights, the boys pulled it back to 4-3 by the end.

We also finished with a game of Settlers of Catan on the last night, and our poor bodies were not used to the later nights with all the game playing combined with our usual early starts with our two munchkins up at sparrows most mornings, so Mark and I were feeling pretty weary!

It was with sadness that we said our goodbyes and waved them on their way. We hope it won't be too long until we can be together again but we were so blessed to have had this time together over the past 2 weeks.

And the timing of their departure was perfect with Mr McSpotty breaking out in chicken pox the morning they left. Poor poppet, but in all honesty we were again so blessed to have had our whole wonderful holiday first without rhe spectre of chickenpox ruining our plans. Even my dodgy stomach didn't really stop us from getting out and about even though there were a few hairy moments.

A strong course of antibiotics from the doctor have helped, but I'm still waiting to find out what caused it in the first place. 10 days of diarrhea and stomach cramps isn't something you really want or expect over the holidays! I'm probably going to go back to the specialist and see if that will help with any answers.

So the end of these summer holidays, but by no means the end of our summer fun. At this stage, it looks like Mylo will definitely be off daycare for some or all of this week, which means the usual juggling act for us with work, and even more so since we only had 2 weeks of work planned before another week's annual leave coming up with our trip to Northland, and Grandma & Grandad arrive in just a week's time!

But instead of wondering how on earth it will all come together, I will just have to keep trusting in the One who has us all in the palm of his hand.