7-9 Mahimahi Again

So Chance and I are now completing my second tour of Northland (his first). We came back up taking the scenic routes, driving through random rain showers and rainbows. Chance's name is now on the rental car agreement so he had fun driving on the left and cruising up the coast. We arrived at Graeme's place in time to get the fire started and to cook dinner. We had a lovely dinner and Chance got to try Hokey Pokey ice cream and then we went to sleep quite early (Chance is still on LA time.)

The next day we got up extremely early (before the sunrise) to go with Graeme to his Toastmasters meeting. This one was structured a bit differently than the last one and the turn out wasn't very good because it was at the same time as the world cup match. The theme for the meeting was love and for the 1-minute impromptu speeches, Chance was called up to talk about Loveology University and I was called up to speak on "Unrequited Love." Both of our speeches were better than their new member's speech, who stalled out halfway through. Chance gave a good company spiel and I spoke very fast giving every analogy of love that I could think of. It was pretty interesting but a fun meeting. Then we went shopping for a wireless router for Graeme so that he could make his place wireless. When we got home we had tea and then went out into the garden to lay some irrigation piping (black hose) down to where the hot tub will be. Chance gave Graeme some advice on the hot tub and I dug trenches to hide the pipe under the lawn. It was fun scrambling around in the bush and we saw a big centipede. Once we were done, we went for a walk around the neighbor's property which is quite huge. We went "bush bashing" meaning, walking through the uncleared native bush on a non-existent trail. We saw two dead possums and found a nice big piece of firewood which had to be dragged all the way up the hill back to the house.

After lunch, Graeme went to work and to an annual surveyors dinner and Chance and I went to Matauri Bay. The waves were much bigger this time and there was a bit of a wind, but it was still quite neat to look around. It was high tide too so there weren't many tidepools to investigate. Over the beach was the most perfect and complete rainbow but then the rain arrived so we headed back. We had dinner and then tried to set up the wireless router, only to discover that the plastic for the antenna was broken.

This morning, Graeme went into town early to exchange the router and Chance and I painted the partition between the two bedrooms upstairs. We had a lovely breakfast outside and then got the wireless set up, which is quite wonderful. No longer will people have to share the one cable that has the connection. We're now packed up and are about to head down to the Cormandels. Should be fun. I'll update when possible.