Blogs from Hawkes Bay, North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 14

Waimarama Wedding As the title suggests, Kaela & I were married on Waimarama Beach (Why-Mere-A-Muh) in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, on Friday, March 30th, 2007. Sorry it has taken us so long to get this out, however I returned from New Zealand a couple of weeks ago and have had a difficult time resizing a considerable portion of the photos so that this site would download them. So without further ado, we hope you enjoy. We left San Francisco on the 17th and crossed the international date line, putting us in Auckland on the 19th of March. Marley slept through the night which made the 13hr flight easier than expected. Each time I fly I swear they make the seats smaller and smaller, making my life misery. :-) We arrived in Auckland and headed straight ... read more

To break the journey up to Wellington, we decided to stay at Napier for the night, as we'd heard other people say it was a really nice place. We got there just in time for lunch and tickled our tastebuds with some organic food at Manna Soul Food Cafe, which did the job nicely. We had a walk round to look at the art deco buildings (Napier was flattened by an earthquake in the 1930's and had to be totally rebuilt). We also walked along the promenade, which was pleasant enough. We decided that we would find our accommodation, which was on the outskirts of Napier - Portside Lodge. However, when we got there, we just took one look at it and decided it wasn't a place that we wanted to stay (especially after our ... read more

Well what have we been up to in the last few days i hear you ask....Well kelly and i are still living, breathing and sleeping in this frigging van. I woke up with her hair in my mouth the other morning and every night we go to bed we open the sun roof of the van and gaze at the stars together- how romantic. So we have now driven up to the tip - Cape Reinga and seen the Tasman and Pacific oceans meet which was special and then drove down the motoraway and pulled off to surf the sand dunes and some sandunes these were. We all felt as though we'd stepped into the desert. James hired a board and surfed down them. Also visited ninety mile beach which is actually 56 miles long (no ... read more

Wicked concert, sat in the sun, drank beer and wine and ate yummy food. Awesome Hawkes Bay Weekend!... read more

We drove the short (20km) drive this morning from Napier to Hastings to trace some of my deceased relatives. On a tip off from my Uncle Steve we managed to find the library in Hastings where a very helpful assistant pointed us in the right direction of where my relatives used to live. We found the death records on micro fiche for Lillian Ellen Hampton and John Rowe, but nothing for Daisy Rowe. We also managed to find information on the burial plots of Lillian and John in the genealogy internet archives at the library and found out they had headstones in Hastings too. We drove to a flower shop and purchased a couple of small bouquets for the graves and then made our way to the cemetery where we managed to find all three headstones ... read more