Trip of Giants - Moutere, Mapua and a clan gathering

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After a leisurely sleep-in in very cosy beds, we visited Grandma Shirley for a brief catch up. She gave me a pile of old photos from my childhood days that brought back a few memories. Fancy your parents keeping valentines day cards from when you were 6! Apparently some girl named Kelly really had the hots for me back then!

After a quick photo op, we then headed to the Marsden Valley Cemetary to pay respects to mum and dad. We also walked up to my Grandmother and grandfathers' graves to show the boys. Joseph had the camera and took photos of the gravestones.

Next we drove up the Moutere to show the boys the Settlers Cottage, which my ancestors the Harveys lived in. I took the Moutere Highway, then a turnoff and up the winding green hills of the Upper Moutere. Somewhere along there I made a wrong turn and we missed both the cottage and the Upper Moutere village (where we wanted to again see Katie Gold's wonderful pottery). I have an old photo of the cottage that I'll show them later.

We arrived in Motueka, visited the info centre to get maps of the Arts and Crafts along the way, and then having only a little time left decided a trip in to Mapua was the trick.

At the Mapua wharf, Joseph and Liam skipped stones over the calm low-tide waters across from Rabbit Island. Ky and I had a really good look in the Coolstore Gallery. It is really impressive, lots of different types of art and of course there was bound to be something in there that appealed to us! We fell for a colourful, amusing teapot with bare-bummed ladies frolicking amongst daisies that erupt from the pot.

Dinner was very tasty fish and chips from Rainbow fish and chips in Stoke. Ky's battered sausage was absolutely enormous! I guessed too big for a cultured lady (which proves she's cultured as she couldn't finish it). Then we were off the meet the clan!

The evening with the Bartlett clan was fantastic. We caught up with cousins, second cousins, third cousins and some removed several times. The cousin most needing removal ended up being Joseph, although not his fault this time. He decided to draw a big face on the whiteboard in the room in red whiteboard marker. Only the marker wasn't a whiteboard marker and the whiteboard is now lightly stained pinky-purple. So a bunch of the girls pitched in to help him clean it, and then all the kids got in there and doodled up Happy Birthdays for Glenn. Happy Birthday Glenn!

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