RTW Day 29 - Greytown

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Not a great start to the day; I’m up at 4 am to answer a barrage of increasingly stressed texts from daughter no 1 who is offloaded from a flight at Bucharest airport for ‘acting suspiciously’.

It’s our last day visiting friends who suggest an outing to Greytown - claim to fame NZ small town of the year 2017. It’s a beautiful little town with many traditional wooden Victorian buildings (the fire brigade is very centrally located). We wander along the high street admiring the architecture and Greytown’s other pride, its abundance of mature trees. Most notably the Historic Tree, an enormous eucalyptus planted, having been stolen off a wheelbarrow while its owner was in the pub, in 1856.

On the outskirts is the Cobblestone Museum. This isn’t as I first suspected a museum decided to cobblestones. It’s a selection of old public buildings which, having outlived their usefulness, were moved here to create a ‘settlement village’. We take a look around and learn Greytown has another claim to fame - it is here that the Kidd family, whilst experimenting with cross-pollination, created the Gala Apple.

We stop for lunch at the Clareville Bakery, very proud of its status of ‘Best Regional Rural Café of the Year’. The food is good but their success is reflected in their prices. I’m not sure even a really good cheese and ham toastie is worth $17.

We head home, stopping (suddenly) along the way to photograph a mother pukeko bird with two babies which we spot on the verge. A pleasant day out plus child no 1 has successfully booked and boarded another flight to Dubai.

In the evening we head out to My Holdsworth Pizza. It’s literally at the end of a track half way up a mountain in the middle of nowhere but it’s absolutely packed. It’s owned by a Swiss family and built to resemble an alpine chalet. You have to order a base in advance then make your topping choice on arrival. We sit by the brook listening to the live band with our BYO wine until our pizzas arrive. I have blue cheese, bacon and onion and it’s delicious. A perfect relaxing end to the end to the day.

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