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Hi all - another belated blog that's almost 2 months behind. This is getting a bit like my project at work but not quite as late or over budget, of course.
Hope you're all well and enjoying some warmer temperatures - what I saw of the sport last weekend (Golf from Wales and footie from old trafford) showed that things were nice and sunny. Its also very sunny here at the moment if a touch parky, especially at night but it is now officially winter so can't expect too much.
Now, where did I leave off? Jo-Ann's Mum's visit, of course.... I guess the next stuff of note was the long Easter weekend, which seems like a long time ago now. The weather was mixed as it tends to be here on holiday weekend, but on the Saturday we went to Makara Beach and walked on the cliffs where we had fantastic views over an unusually flat calm Cook Strait and across to the tip of the South Island.
Makara Beach itself isn't up to much and is very exposed to the legendary Cook Strait gales but on this occasion it was as calm as you like and
reasonably warm. The walk goes up a decently steep hill to some WW2 gun placements, very much disused of course but they were constantly manned until the war in the Pacific ended in 1945. In fact, the Japanese did fly over Wellington during the war but luckily neglected to drop any bombs.
Then it snaked down to the beach where there were some amazing piles of debris from years and years of gale lashing. We then had to negotiate our way along the water's edge across dodgy rocks until we ended up back on the beach again. We were assured that even when the tide is in, its safe to walk across those rocks but we weren’t' so sure so we moved quickly to get back to the car!
On the Sunday we were going to go for a walk across the harbour just passed the des res of Eastbourne but we changed our minds when we got there - or more like we couldn't find the starting point of the walk! Instead we headed back to the city and walked through the town belt, which is a tree-covered hill just behind where we live. The views weren't
Island hopping
Looking towards Mana Island (left foreground) and Kapiti Island (left background) as great as we'd hoped but we could see the stage being assembled at the stadium for the Strolling Bones concert on the Tuesday.
Now that's a good link! Neither of us were hugely fussed about going to see the Stones but Jo-Ann was keen-ish as she hadn't seen them before and although I'd seen them twice before, it really depended on the ticket price. The Stones visit was a big deal for the city as they hadn't played in Wellington since 1966 and the town got pretty excited as everyone acknowledged that this was pretty much the last chance to see the old rockers without btravelling overseas. We got offered some of the cheap tickets at face value and thought what the heck. We were going to have a barbie on out balcony and invite folk round to listen to the concert for free but it turned out that pretty much everyone we knew was going so we'd have been a bit lonely!
Despite our desperately cheap seats (nose-bleed tastic and sure to bring back memories to Mr Birrell of his REM at Murrayfield shocker), we really enjoyed it. Jagger is still amazingly fit and still has
a voice unlike Richards who attempted an acoustic solo track from the new album that had the crowd scurrying for the toilet and the bar - don't give up the day job, Keef but definitely give up climbing for coconuts in Fiji.
I took loads of photos but their quality was somewhat mixed from the very back with the camera's very limited zoom range but I'll attach a few anyway.
I guess the other most notable event has been the Hurricanes charge/crawl into rugby's Super14 Final. We went to the semi, which was in Wellington, and it was fantastic - the Hurricanes have never been to the final and beating the Waratahs from Sydney was especially sweet for the home fans! Unfortunately, the final was in Christchurch against the annoyingly impressive and consistent Crusaders who won a farce of a game in think fog that meant most of the crowd and those watching on TV couldn’t follow the game. A mate from work flew down fort the game and left after 15 minutes to try top watch it in the pub - he was philosophical in stating that it summed up being a Hurricanes fan....you wait 11 years
Quality hedgehog roadkill...
Just not sure how it got up on top of the cliffs for your first final and you still can't see it!
The main media interwest after the game was handbag-gate - the great Tana Umaga smacking his team mate Chris 'Bastard Hard' Masoe in the face with a burd's handbag after he'd smacked this bloke who had the audacity to leave his legs in the way as Chris walked past him and subsequently tripped. Big Masoe then burst into tears, obviously just remembering that his team had lost in the final and he should have been in his bed ages ago (the incident happened at 7am in a pub in Christchurch). It was all a bit embarrasing but even worse was the fact that some nugget with way too much disposable income then bought the handbag used by Tana in an on-line auction for $22,800!! Mental..... Masoe was fined $3,000 by the NZRFU but will undoubtedly be more punished by the slaggings of his team- mates and opposing fans from now on.
I'll try and do another blog soon to report on the weekend just passed (another holiday weekend - thank you Queen for having so many birthdays!) in the province of Taranaki.
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