This weekend I travelled down to Papamoa with a friend to catch up with friends we haven’t seen for ages. The drive down was fun and traffic was great, only one quick stop at the BP Papakura Truckstop for petrol and snacks.

Nic #1 greeted us with a glass of wine and we sorted out what we would do first, which turned out to be the Beach Bar on Papamoa Beach – a short walk from Nic’s house.

This is such a cool bar, the view is out over the ocean and has happy hour drinks for two hours which we made the most of and the food was awesome.

After several drinks and dinner we walked home along the beach, dipping just our toes in the very refreshing water, the weather was perfect.

After we got home, we took a quick drive to the supermarket for supplies (beers) and spent the evening watching the big, beautiful orange moon rising and the stars come out.

Next morning we were up relatively early for a walk to a place called “Fashion Island” – the name amused me greatly. We had to walk because there was going to be a Santa Parade down Nic’s street and the road was blocked off, but it wasn’t too far to walk to Fashion Island anyway.

On the way I was seriously impressed with all the Pohutukawa trees (NZ’s native Xmas tree) in full bloom and it was another stunning cloudless blue sky day.

Fashion Island is basically an area filled with outlet stores and amongst it all is a really great cafe called Blackberry and that’s where we met up with Nic #2. What a cool little reunion – the 4 of us all used to work together, so we had loads to catch up on and find out. Afterwards we took a stroll through some of the shops then Nic #2 drove us back to Nic #1’s home, after we got dropped off we basically packed up our stuff and headed home – another fun drive with great traffic. At one point there was a slight concern about which way to drive home coz New Zealand’s first IKEA just opened on Thursday and we were thinking the traffic would be bad at Mt Wellington, however the traffic was actually better than it normally is.