Volcano

What an eventful week it's been! The first piece of good news is that Michelle now has a job!! The days of having to come home after the ministry and search for one have past, in fact she actually got 3 job offers but she ended up going for a part time role as one of the Mayor of Auckland's PAs!! So she will soon be putting the city to rights and giving him the benefit of her wisdom - sadly he doesn't seem to be as exciting as Boris or Ken, but you can't complain!

The second major event in our lives this week was that we now have somewhere to live! We are moving in with some lovely sisters in the congregation and have found a fantastic 5 bed house just around the corner from Josh and Shianne (so we can still pop round for dinner!). We move in at the beginning of March, so sadly you'll have to wait until then for the pictures and guided tour via the blog...

Between job and house hunting though we have been keeping ourselves suitably amused... On Sunday James and Laura hosted a mini pool party which really was a lot of fun:

Annie proving that you can go into the pool and not get your hair wet...

Then it was back to the routine of ministry as it was our last full week off before we start work, however we managed to fit in a couple of tourist things in at the same time - we took a detour on Monday and went to the summit of Mount Eden (or Maungawhau in Maori), the highest non man made point in Auckland. Fortunately this volcano hasn't erupted for 15,000 years so I felt it was a 'low risk' activity!! The views over the city are amazing, sadly it was a little cloudy but you could still appreciate them...

View of the Auckland skyline - the Sky Tower is the highest man-made point in New Zealand

View of One Tree Hill - more famous these days for its lack of a tree at all!!

We managed to find a token tourist to take a photo of our witnessing group, and were even able to give a little witness when they asked how we all knew each other, so it wasn't a wasted 15 minute break!

Natalie, MZ, KZ, Jessemay (our new housemate!)

Pointing to our places of origin - (clockwise from left) Dunedin, London and San Francisco

Carrying on with the spirit of being tourists after the ministry today we decided to go and visit Auckland Museum (especially as this month it is free for Auckland residents, so we had added incentive!). We went with Wendy Baldwin, who is over on a visit from the UK and perhaps might stay (visa depending) so it was lovely to catch up with her and have a fellow tourist to share the experience with! The museum gives a good overview of Maori culture (although Mich wouldn't let me watch the dancing exhibition, apparently we have to wait for Rotorura), as well as info on the flora and fauna of the country (moas were seriously huge!). But our favourite part was the bit all about volcanoes, something quite important to learn about when you consider that Auckland is built on top of lots! The best part was going into a typical Auckland house and experiencing what it would be like if one erupted in Auckland (I think we entertained everyone by jumping and shrieking when the house started to move unexpectedly!) Lets hope the 'big one' doesn't happen whilst we are here...

Michelle failing to be an authentic statue!

The Auckland Museum

I think the sign says it all!!

Why does it always rain on me??

Kz and I have just come back off our little road trip to Tauranga at the weekend to see Bjorn and Kelly. They live in a beautiful area of Nz, the surrounding area known as the Bay of Plenty and there are lots of lovely beaches and beautiful countryside....when its sunny!!

We set off early on Sat morning with high hopes as the weather was amazing and took the drive down passing through Paeroa on the way - home to Nz's national soft drink! We soon discovered that like the Aussies the Kiwis like their 'big' things and were amused to find a giant 23 foot L&P bottle in the town, which was obviously screaming out to be photographed!

Why?!

The sign says it all!

They may have had a giant bottle in town but there was absolutely no where decent to get breakfast (where are the Tesco Express chocolate croissants when you need them!) so we made our visit short and carried on to our next destination. (It should be said at this point that it did make us reminisce about our last road trip in Nz where we had to stop every two hours to feed certain hungry kiwi boys - you know who you are!!)

Our next destination was Karangahake Gorge which apart from being beautiful is known for its gold mining. Some interesting facts for you - in their heyday (1883 - 1933) the Karangahake mines were among the largest of their type in Nz and produced 4,000,000 oz of gold bullion. Today you can still walk along the tramways and through the tunnels, some of which are over 1km long with some of the vertical shafts going down over 700m!

It might not look it but the bridges were very wobbly - Kz definitely felt it was screaming out for a 'risk' sign!!

The closest we got to gold mining!

Walking through the tunnels in the hillside - very dark!! I wouldn't recommend it without a torch!

Kz and I decided to go for the Windows Walk, which is basically the walk through various ones of the tunnels - however, the 'we don't recommend you do this without a torch' sign is obviously there for a reason because after the first few tunnels that you can walk through quite easily, the tunnels then get longer and pitch dark and good sense (for once!) kicked in! Next time....

We left the gorge and carried on to Tauranga and met up with Bjorn and Kelly. Unfortunately about 10 mins after we left the gorge the rain kicked in and literally was monsoon like for the rest of the weekend! It put an end to our ideas of going out on the boat or to the beach so instead we went on the hunt for more 'big' things!! And look what we found - a giant kiwi fruit!!

The jury is still out on whether this beats the Big Pineapple!!

Seriously - Kz and I were saying that we don't have anything like this in England because we actually have proper big things of historical interest rather than having to make them up!!

Sunday morning meant that we woke to more of the same weather wise so after the meeting we decided to spend the remainder of the afternoon in the pub, having got slightly addicted to Monopoly deal - for those of you that haven't tried it I recommend it - its all the best bits of Monopoly without the boring bits and still has the ability to bring out all your worst mercenary characteristics!!

We then completed our evening by a visit to the natural hot pools, which were a lovely way to relax after our hard day, before heading home to see Andy Murray lose the tennis - shame!

So we had a great weekend in Tauranga - Monday was a bank holiday but due to the awful weather we let Bjorn and Kelly go out on the min and we headed back to Auckland, with the excuse of being able to head down there again sometime soon to see it in the nice weather!

The final photo is for Sharon - we saw this and how could we not think of you!!