Sheepworld

As part of Royston's birthday weekend we headed north to Sheepworld - a great excuse to behave like children! The farm area provides plenty of opportunities to feed the various animals.






As well as the obvious sheep, there were also donkeys, miniature horses, pigs and this rather hairy goat.







We then went to watch the sheep show, which firstly involved a brief history of the different breeds of sheep, followed by the sheep dogs rounding up the sheep into a pen.






This was then followed by a demonstration of sheep shearing.

First BBQ of Spring

As the weather was good Sunday morning, we decided to risk a BBQ for lunch, well more of a sausage sizzle actually, but it still counts.

The weather started to get more cloudy and grey as we lit the Barbie, but that's to be expected.

We managed to finish cooking lunch just before the rain started and set in for the day. It was great to have our first BBQ of the season.

Here's to many more throughout spring and summer...

A Year Here!

Today we celebrated our first year as NZ residents. The 28 hour flight seems a very distant past! The year has flown by, and we are both happy and settled in our new life and jobs, and now saving hard so that we can buy our own home. We had a nice meal of smoked kingfish followed by aged fillet steak to celebrate.

Mangawhai Heads

Today we took a day's holiday as part of the build up to our year of being in NZ. As the weather was good, we headed north of Auckland to Mangawhai Heads. Our first stop off was to walk up to a look out which gave great views over the township and the beach over to the sand dunes.





We then went down to the beach where we were the only people on it!






After a nice walk on the beach we headed into Mangawhai for a fish and chip lunch - the best snapper and oysters we have had so far.

Rugby World Cup at Work

We have embraced the RWC at work, with each area being allocated a country and then having several tasks to complete. The main job was to decorate your area in the theme of the country. Unfortunately, I had the misfortune of being allocated France, but we have made an honourable (?!!) attempt at building the Eiffel Tower.



Here are some pictures of the other areas - firstly Italy, the winners of the decorating competition. They built the Leaning Tower of Pisa amongst other things.











The Australian team created a replica of Ayres Rock which you can just see on the floor down the corridor.








Whilst the New Zealand team have turned their area black.

The office looks really good, and has brought out a lot of friendly rivalry.