Tawharanui Regional Park

Today we headed north to Tawharanui Regional Park, a place we have been before and thought to be an ideal first experience of a New Zealand beach for Mum & Dad. We pretty much had the place to ourselves.





Mum & Dad managed a quiet walk on the beach.







Before the fabulous weather allowed a picnic lunch on the beach.

Dad's Birthday

To celebrate Dad's 70th birthday, Mum & Dad have come to visit us in our new country. The first full day (his birthday) was spent exploring the North Shore. This is of the three of us at the top of North Head looking over to Auckland.






In the evening we went to the French Cafe, one of Auckland's top award winning restaurants which was very good.

Powderfinger Concert

After waiting 4 years we finally got to see Powderfinger in concert and they didn't disappoint. The best band in the world!!

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.