By the time we surfaced on Friday morning Julie had gone to work but Rob was still at home having taken the day off. We went into Warkworth at lunchtime and I went to the bank, where I have been able to open a temporary account, to sort out details. We then met up with Julie for lunch at the Bridge before doing a small shop at the New World supermarket and going back to their place.
There had been major weather warnings in force on Friday night for heavy rain and winds up to 150km an hour over the North Island. Luckily, although it had been pretty windy, it seemed that the worst of the storm had been south of Auckland. The weather stayed pretty blustery so we had a lazy day and Rob cooked a delicious piece, at my request, of corned beef (salt beef) for dinner.
Rob was working on Sunday, Julie and I went into shop in Warkworth in the morning and in the afternoon we packed up our bags again and Julie brought us over to the Omaha River Retreat which is to be our base for the next 51/2 months. John and Jill don't leave until the 16th so until then we are staying in the flat which was our “home” for 6 weeks last year. It's good to be back and I have to say that when we left I never thought that we would be back again! After a chat with Jill and John we were soon settled in and enjoying knowing that we had finally come to rest after all our travels.
It's now a week since we arrived in NZ and we are feeling more and more at home. It's been a bit of a lazy week and we are now looking forward to moving into Jill's converted barn when they leave next Friday.
We walk down to the estuary every day and admire the view from the seat down there. It's an ever changing view depending on the tide and one that I never tire of. A couple of New Zealand harriers mated and nested on the property and have raised 2 chicks. It's good to see them circling around.
We went to the cinema in Matakana, on Wednesday, to see The War Horse which we both enjoyed. The cinema in Matakana comprises of 4 small cinemas showing up to date films and I am sure that we will be visiting there most weeks. It's never very busy and we always like to get one of the very comfortable, reclining seats at the front. In the evening we went over to Jill's and sat on the deck with her and John chatting about their forthcoming trip.
Thursday we went into Warkworth and had lunch there as well as doing some shopping and looking around. Rob called in, on his way home from work, and we had an hour or so chatting. It's good that he is so close and can call in, it's the sort of thing that we haven't been able to do for so many years.
The weather has been very mixed with quite a lot of rain one day. It seems that they haven't had a good summer here so we are hoping for an Indian summer now that autumn is just around the corner.
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