I know, I haven’t posted anything in a while. Blogging just doesn’t come easy for me – definitely not as easy as talking with someone. Writing can be such a chore. Anyway, since my last blog, we have had 2 snows , one of which actually brought flurries to Blenheim. From what I understand, that’s almost unheard of. The weather report was for a severe storm with very strong winds and snow so Ernie & I headed to Rarangi Beach to see what the waves looked like. While we were walking the beach, it started snowing. How cool is that to have snow while walking the beach!
The first snow happened while Joelle & Trevor were on their was to Auckland for a food & wine show. Jasmin was on school holiday and staying with us in Blenheim. We decided to take a bit of a mini-holiday with her and went to Hanmer Springs. This is a quaint alpine town in the mountains south of Blenheim. They were hit really hard by the first snowfall and we couldn’t go there on the first day of our holiday because the roads were closed. We were able to go the following day and thus cut our vacation from 5 days to 4 days. Hanmer Springs is a geothermal area and there is a ‘center’ that has 15 pools of different sizes and different water temperature. They also have 2 water slides, a water funnel (sort of like a toilet bowl effect) and a heated lap pool. It is really great! Three of the pools are filled with the heated mineral water that is really good for the skin. We went to the pools during the day on our first day. On the second day, we decided to go at night and enjoy the pools and slides under the stars. Since we were in the water most of the time – no pictures.

Since then, we’ve been busy with various activities around town – Jasmin’s netball games, some treks along the river, water aerobics for me at the city pool, duplicate bridge for Ernie at the Clubs Marlborough on Monday evenings and Wednesday afternoon. I’ve also arranged with a lady one street over from Joelle to have her teach me how to weave – on a loom. This is something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the time or opportunity to do.

So that’s been our last month/month-and-a-half. We are now on the north island. We left Blenheim on Thursday, 9/1 and got to Paihia in the Bay of Islands on Friday. We have a great condo for a week here. I’ll be posting stuff about our activities here but may not be able to get the photos on line along with the text. As I said in some of my earlier postings, there is no such thing a free internet here. We have purchased internet time from Vodaphone (by way of a USB stick that we connect to the computer) but the loading time in this area is quite slow. I'll start posting info about this trip but may have to wait to post the photos. More to come.........