Long weekend in Patea

We had a great time at Pauls, here's what we did.....

We arrived on Saturday at about 3/4pm ish and Paul showed us round his big massive new farmhouse and then we had a little drive around the farm. His Dad Nick has recently sold a lot of the land which is how they built the super duper house. We had a little drive into Patea which isnt very big and there isnt much to do. We drove to Patea beach and then back to his house. We watched a bit of rugby and played a couple of games of pool and had a nice big roast for tea. Belts was supposed to come but the road from Palmerston North was closed due to a landslide because of the weather.
On Sunday we drove down to the farm's petrol pump to top up his car and got stuck in the mud, we were there for about 45 mins trying to push it out and bump it out with the quad bike but had to call Nick to tow us out with his ute. We had a drive to a dairy (corner shop) that sells good pies for lunch, and then on to New Plymouth which was pretty nice. The pic is of us at the Wind Wand. On the way back we stopped at a little museum about the first settlers into Taranaki (the region where Patea is) and out back was a guy's collection of tractors. Not being sure if they real, we jumped on to find out, while Robyn was busy making friends with the dummys. We were going to go out on a possum hunt Sunday night but the weather was rubbish so we just stayed in and chilled out really.
Monday morning we had a little drive round the farm on the quad and had a drive to another little local beach. After lunch we togged up and drove the truck out onto the farm and found some goats and did a bit of shooting. The goats were pretty big and reasonably nippy for such whoppers, so we had a little run after them. We swapped some rugby stuff when we got back, so ive got no Cas stuff anymore, but a few t-shirts and a jumper from the local rugby club which is good. The drive back took about 2 hours and the road was full of mud from all the slips because of the weather.

Our friend the frequent flyer

So this weekend we're off down to Patea to stay with our mate Paul for the weekend. We met Paul when we was travelling the UK and we played at the same rugby club, along with Belts and Jobby. We've had a weekend with Belts so now its time for Paul to play host. He shouldn't really be here though, he'd planned to go back to the UK on a visitor visa but was for some reason refused entry, maybe because of his little ginger beard?
The weather has been pretty stinky for about a week now, and loads of snow has been washed off the mountain which isn't good.
Booked our ferry crossing today for our trip down to the south island, sailing 26 October from Wellington which should be good.
Picked up the car from the garage yesterday so now we're $460 worse off. We'd budgeted about $200 for this little service so needless to say we were a bit shocked when the guy told us how much we owed.
Beeen dog-sitting this week for Heidi who has gone down to Christchurch for some pre-deployment training before she goes to Antarctica. He's pretty mellow, but seems more concerned with having an intimate physical relationship with Simon's dog Flint than anything else at the moment, even though they're both boy dogs.

Whakapapa

After we had finished cleaning on Sunday we headed up the mountain for a snowboarding session. Unfortunately the rest of the population had also decided to do the same thing and it was super busy! We queued for ages to get onto the lifts and then tried not to hit the hundreds of people that were on the slopes. I fell over when we got off one of the lifts, took James out with me and cried like a baby when I twisted my ankle!
Today though we headed round to the Whakapapa side of the mountain and snowboarded there much more successfully! It was much quieter and a different slopes made it interesting and a nice change. Almost a pro now............
By now I'm sure everyone has heard about the earthquake in Christchurch, thankfully for us we live no where near, although people swear they felt the shakes here!

Our new bikes

On Monday we drove back to Taupo and got our medicals all signed off, so all we need now is to go to immigration and tell them we're healthy and we should be able to extend our visas for a second year.

While we were there we paid our usual visit to The Warehouse and Pak'n'Save, two massive shops which we don't have in our tiny town of Ohakune, and ended up buying a mountain bike each! We'd sort of planned to buy one, but maybe thought we'd have a look and price some up, but The Warehouse were having a sale and they were half price so we bought some, loaded up the Suby (which we found out today is in the top10 most nick-able cars in NZ) and bombed back to Ohakune.

The bikes were supposed to be '90% complete, needing only an average of 25 minutes construction'. This was obviously rubbish as a couple of hours later I haad both built up and we took them out for a spin!

Yesterday we took them for a real ride. We'd been keen to get up the mountain but the weather was pretty poor and everything was closed up the hill. We rode the Old Coach Road(our last blog) and it was super muddy and much more uphill than we remembered. Coming down was easy and fun though, splashing through all the muddy puddles.

The car should be going in for a service this week, so fingers crossed it'll be in good enough shape to make the 1000km trip down to Lake Paringa, if not it'll be a super long bike ride.