30th October – Mckee Reserve

I’d planned to spend our day of sunshine running, relaxing, reading and walking and it started off well with a nice jog.

After that though I’m not sure what happened. A ‘quick springclean’ of the car ended up somehow taking up the vast majority of the day and an awful lot of campsite space. I had our bedclothes airing on walkway handrails, the bed propped up against one picnic table, the tarp drying off draped over another, and all of our stuff spread out all over the grass.

Meanwhile, Matt was happily extending a lighter socket to the back of the car so we could plug our cooler in now the weather has heated up.

I’m sure no-one wants any more details about that and, other than a funny conversation with a fella who I thought was part of the family business but turned out to be doing community service, that was pretty much the whole of the day. Although we did get invited over to the neighbours’ to eat fresh bread, made in the wood-burning stove.

We spent the evening around the fire with Helen, Ken and Phil, making pancake letters on the stove in a cast-iron pan and generally listening to Phil as he told us ‘interesting facts’, comically -crappy jokes and showed us time-lapse videos of Maori ‘haungei’ – which we narrowly escaped watching all huddled together around a plug socket in the toilet.