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Xmas Holidays 2015 Day Four

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Tuesday 22 December 2015

Road trip – yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A friend recently bought a new car and was keen to do a wee road trip somewhere and I was very keen to go to New Plymouth to see Mt Taranaki, the Pukekura Gardens lit up for Xmas and the brand new Len Lye Gallery, both of which I read about in the Air New Zealand magazine a couple of months ago – so it seemed like the perfect place for a road trip.

Our first stop for coffee was in the Clock World & Longitude Cafe in Ohaupo, which is somewhere just south of Hamilton.  The Clock World shop was awesome with many fabulous clocks but the cafe left a lot to be desired.  The service was incredibly slow, the person behind the counter was kinda rude and prefered to organise her cakes into some sort of order rather than serving us and the coffee wasn’t all that great.
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That was our one and only stop on the way to New Plymouth, just as well I’d packed a gift box of Kahlua Chocolates or I may have starved to death. It was a lovely easy drive with lots of great scenery, but the weather wasn’t great and I was a tad disappointed that I couldn’t see THE mountain at all.  I was hoping for better weather the next day so I could see it.

We checked in to the The Devon Hotel which was really lovely and set off in search of a snack to tide us over till dinner.The Devon The Devon The Devon The Devon

Second dinner was in the hotel restaurant which was a glorious buffet and it felt like half of the the town also went there for dinner – children and all for a Xmas dinner treat I guess, coz it was packed and people I spoke to all lived in New Plymouth. Anyway the food was great!

After that we set off for Pukekura Park which the TSB Bank turns into a “Festival of Lights” from the 13th of December to the end of January. It was truly spectacular and well worth the drive from Auckland.
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Xmas Holidays 2015 Day Three

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Monday, 21 December, 2015

Today was the first official day of my annual leave, a Monday where many people still went to work.  I’m going away on a road trip tomorrow so I decided to try my luck at the local mall and hope for a car park and not too many crowds and buy a double USB car charger.  That way I could Bluetooth my iPhone to my friend’s car stereo and charge it, incase that drained the battery too much and still have his GPS plugged in or whatever else he needs plugged into the cigarette lighter.

I was in luck… there were plenty of parks and not too many people, in fact as I walked past Santa on his throne I was fairly certain he was fast asleep and there were no people waiting to have their photos taken with Santa.

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I found the double USB thing plus I scored a very handy plug box with two fast USB charging slots and two ordinary sockets and a little extension cord, perfect for travelling when the only place to charge your stuff while in a hotel room is trickily located behind some curtain and there’s only one plug.

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I also scored some awesome purple lights for half price at the warehouse.

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But I didn’t really know what to do with them, so out of pure desperation to do something with them I chucked them on the towel thing in the bathroom, which turned out to be very cool, coz I don’t need to use the light in there anymore as the purple lights are so bright!

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Xmas Holidays 2015 Day Two

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Sunday 20 December 2015

Today was a mini Xmas day.  Because the majority of the family will not be in Auckland on Xmas day we had a pre-xmas get together so that the ones unable to be here on Xmas day wouldn’t miss out on some great food and a present.  We all contributed some food and only had to buy one present each within the set price limit.

Once we’d eaten we took turns at selecting a gift which turned out to be good fun and I scored a groovy bluetooth speaker which will come in very handy.

Dad was driving so that meant I was able to have a few wines before, during and after lunch which added to the enjoyment of the day.

At 4:00 we left and once I was back home I got to have a few more wines in the afternoon sun – what a lovely day.

Afternoon wine

Xmas Holidays 2015 Day One

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Saturday, 19 December 2015

Dear loyal readers- all four of you, it’s that time of year again where I sit out in my courtyard sipping coffee wondering what to do next – I’m on holiday and this time it’s for a whole four weeks – yahoo!  I have no big plans, I’m not going away, nobody is coming from overseas and even Xmas day will be a nice quiet small affair with many of the usual family members going away and not here on Xmas Day.

Naturally this led to thoughts of my blog.  I always have such big plans for my blog but then I get busy and because I work with computers all day long, there are many times when I don’t even want to turn on my PC when I get home.  But with all this free time stretching out ahead of me, now feels like the perfect time to crank up the old blog and make a start.

So… what did I do today?  Apart from boring old housework I managed to finally upload the photos I took a couple of weeks ago of the Xmas lights on Franklin Rd, so the friend I went with could see them. Then I decided to get the camera out to see if it was charged up and then take a photo of the massive pile of Lego that I have purchased this year but haven’t got round to actually opening and building.

The reason I’ve ended up with so much Lego is that when a set is first released it is expensive and then the longer you take to buy it (from any of the Trade Me sellers) the more expensive it gets.  You’d think it would get cheaper but they know somebody will always buy it no matter what price they charge, so I have to buy it as soon as it comes out to save money which I realise doesn’t make sense, but it does in the long run.  Check out the little update on my Lego blog.

Then I spent a bit of time hanging up several strings of Xmas lights in the courtyard, after that was done I felt I deserved a beer.  Oh yes my holiday has well and truly begun, the sun umbrella is up, the beer is in hand and the Xmas music is playing. It’s a good life.  Now I can’t wait to see all my handiwork once it gets dark.

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At last it got dark enough to see the lights.

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Plus I made a wee video for you.

Wellington 2015

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A friend and I were keen to keep a tradition going of hanging out in Wellington for a night while she is visiting New Zealand.  Usually I just happen to be in Wellington for work at some part of her holiday so she flies down to meet me, but this time I had no work plans to be there so we flew down together to see the Air New Zealand 75th birthday exhibition at Te Papa.

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I was excited to be sitting on the right side of the airplane as I could see the planes at the international terminal where I had been only two days earlier when we flew back from Sydney.

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Plus we had a great view of the wind turbines and city as we landed.

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We caught a taxi straight to Te Papa, dumped our bags at the front desk and explored.

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There was even a place where you could fill out a memory card of your earliest memory of flying with Air New Zealand, this is my card…

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There was a virtual reality area where you experienced what flying in the future could be like. It was my first experience of virtual reality and it was AMAZING, I really did feel what I was seeing was real.

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I loved the exhibition and would happily go again.  I even bought a couple of model aircraft as souvenirs – the Fokker Friendship which was my first plane to fly on and the NAC Boeing 737.  After we had a quick wander around the rest of Te Papa.

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Outside there is the nose of an old 737 that you could have your photo taken in but the queue was too long and the sun was too hot.

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The weather was fabulous and we enjoyed a short walk to the hotel.

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Dinner was in my favourite restaurant Portofino and my favourite waiter was there (he’d been away for a while on his OE). There was even a gorgeous sunset.

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We found some giant Kina shells and beautiful buildings.

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Before going back to the hotel we caught the cable car up the mountain to enjoy the view while eating an ice cream.

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We ended the evening by enjoying a glass of wine while enjoying the view from my friend’s hotel room (she had a much better view than I did).

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Great flight home the next day and I was even sitting on the right side of the plane again to enjoy the city view as we took off.

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Sydney Day Four

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Sunday, 15 February 2015

Today was our last day in Sydney and we really only had a morning there before we needed to get out to the airport and fly home.

We gathered at a cafe near the hotel for breakfast, somewhere that had mushrooms as part of their breakfast menu.

After breakfast a couple of us headed off for some last minute shopping/sightseeing.  The last thing I needed to check off my to do list was visit the Apple Store, so we headed off down George St past some beautiful old buildings.

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Strangely everything was closed and Sydney seemed like a ghost town at 9:00 on a Sunday morning!

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At last we found the Apple Store after walking what seemed like a really long way, but it didn’t open till 10:00.  Sadly I worked out that if we waited for the store to open, had a very quick look round, NOT buy anything, walk back to the hotel, pack my suitcase and meet everybody in the hotel lobby at the arranged time, I would be really pushing it. So we gave up that idea, found the one coffee outlet that was open, found a nice place to sit and enjoy our coffee and headed back to the hotel.

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The flight home was not as fun and exciting as the flight to Sydney, but at least there were no hold ups and things like check in and airport security was really easy at both ends.  Strangely however there was a sad lack of shops open at the Sydney airport.  Not sure if that was due to renovations, but most stores were empty and looked abandoned.

The view from the plane while we waited for take off was awesome – the city looked really close and hot!

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Sydney Day Three

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Saturday, 14 February 2015

This morning we set off for Bondi Junction by train to do a spot more shopping at another huge Westfield mall and a great super discounted chemist with amazing bargains.  On the way to the train station we saw some unusual looking birds which apparently are called Ibis.

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After shopping we headed back to the hotel to dump our shopping and head out for lunch.

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We caught a taxi from the hotel out to Darling Harbour for lunch where we found a groovy bar and grill called Bungalow 8 right on the waterfront with a great menu.  We ordered a delicious jug of Sangria to go with our lunch.

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After lunch we took a leisurely stroll along the waterfront for about one minute – suddenly the sun was too much and I had to head for the nearest bit of shade.  Shortly we ended up at some wildlife place and I bought a cap which allowed us to go back out into the sun.  From there we caught a ferry to Circular Quay which gave us great views of Darling Harbour and even stopped at Lunar Park.

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A surprise bonus of this little excursion was we got to go under the Harbour Bridge and photograph the Opera House again.

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Once at Circular Quay we caught a different ferry out to Manly.  We wanted to do this for two reasons:

  1. I knew there were great opportunities to photograph the front of the Opera House from that particular ferry and…
  2. There is a song called Reckless by Australian Crawl that has the lyrics: “as the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay.”

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The ferry was jam packed with people (mainly young surfer type dudes) which seemed really strange coz I don’t remember there being anything interesting at Manly for cool people to do.  I went to Manly when I was 16 and all I remember was an old run down aquarium and a very small almost abandoned fun park.  There was so many people I started to feel a bit like Rose on the Titanic – “there weren’t enough life jackets”.  But we survived and because of all the people it took ages to get off the boat.

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Once on dry land we headed for the information centre so I could find out what was going on.  Turned out it was the Australian Open of Surfing.

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The surf beach was only five minutes walk away so we joined the fun.

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Here’s me lovin every minute of it.  We even went for a refreshing paddle in the surf.

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Sadly we had to drag ourselves away from Manly and head back to the hotel in time to meet up with everyone for our last dinner in Sydney.

Near our hotel there were a lot of Chinese new year celebrations going on, so we ended up in a Thai restaurant and got to enjoy all the fruit carving, food stalls and dancing on the street.

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