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The Maire Nui Café and Gardens

So after the confusion that was the Muri Sprints we decided to head out and get some lunch. I’d seen this place off the road and it looked like it might be a nice little café with some gardens, so we stopped there.

The café is a pretty small place, very quiet because it’s off the road. I’d highly recommended if you want a quiet place to sit and have a tea or coffee. It turns out the original place was near the road but it burned down. The new shop used to be an office but they quickly converted it. They serve the usual coffee and tea (the coffee is Atiu coffee and you get a plunger thingy which provides about 3 cups) and they also had a few muffins or sandwiches. I got a muffin and a smoothie (muffin was great, smoothie was nothing to write home about, yet I just did) while dad got another muffin and some coffee. A charge of $5NZ allowed us to walk through their gardens (seems a little pricey but so goes).

So the highlight of this visit was my discovering the macro setting on my camera. This, combined with the ‘cuisine’ setting, provided some pretty good pictures for a point and shoot, I think. These settings allowed me to get some pretty cool pictures of the gardens, which you can see below.

As you can see the gardens are fairly nice. They have a good assortment of flowers as well as fruit trees growing all around. My only beef with it was that the paths weren’t that great and none of the flowers were marked. If the Gardens want to really make it worth the $5 then they need to put in clear pathways with a suggested route, and some labels so we know what each plant is. It’s a nice property though, so if you’re a fan of flowers I’d suggest stopping by and walking around, although you will be tramping around a bit more than you’d expect.

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Photos

A Little Yellow Star
See title. If someone wants to ID these there welcome, I'm thinking Greg Eppinger or some other zealous bio major?

The Pink Flower in the Distance
I was actually trying to take a picture of the foreground but the macro wasn't on the highest setting or something so it got the wrong one. I thought it was amusing so it gets posted here

Another White Flower
90% confidence this is the tiare. This is the only one I think I know

Yellow Flower
Heh, I feel like Dr. Seuss after titling all these pictures. To bad I don't have pictures of any fish...