More from Mangakino

It's been a while since we did any washing, so on Monday Carolyn and I washed a bunch of stuff by hand. It certainly takes a lot more of your time doing it that way. Fortunately, we have plenty of time. The local library has been regularly used also. We walked there on Monday as a family and when we got there they had large boxes of books that they were cancelling from the library. We don't really have room for anymore books (I think we brought too many away with us as it is), and I only had my backpack with me, but I couldn't resist the lure of free books. I flicked through them all as quickly as I could, and ended up with a banana-box full. I crammed them most of them into my backpack, along with 4 litres of milk from the local supermarket, and attached the remaining larger books and a french stick to the outside, then staggered back with the rest of the family in the sweltering humidity. We swam in the lake again later in the day. It's fun jumping in, but the water quality is not great. The lake has a lot of weed (catches your ankles!), and has very low visibility - about 1m. It smells faintly of fetid swamp - a smell which clings to the body and togs after you are dry. I don't really mind the smell too much, but Carolyn isn't quite so tolerant of such things. We have two solar showers (large black bags filled with water, and with a shower head on one end), so we could all have showers. I hung them up against the back of the bach, and we took turns having a quick shower. The back yard is fairly large, but quite private, and both neighbours aren't at home, however it's still feels a bit unusal having a shower more or less out in the open sunshine.

On Tuesday, I finally received my contract for the first half of the year, so I made sure it was signed and sent back again. We spent the bulk of the day reading - I got most of the way through "The Dilbert Principle", by Scott Adams (one of the free books I found in the library). The weather was closing in on Tuesday evening; the remnants of Cyclone Zelia were coming through. The metservice had issued a heavy rain and heavy wind warning for our area, so Abigail and I lowered the awning in the evening. This meant that it wouldn't be blown away during the night, but also that Abigail and James couldn't get from their tent entrance to the caravan door without getting wet. Esther was a bit further away in her own small tent. The rain came and went throughout the afternoon and evening, but after dark was when it really started to rain and blow. It was quite noisy in the caravan, but in the tents would have been much louder! Abigail and James braved the weather and came in at 1:00 am saying they were scared and it was loud. After a short motivational talk ("yes it's loud and scary, but you'll be safe.") they ran back out to the tent and remained there for the rest of the night. As it happened, the storm was nearly over by then anyway, and Wednesday dawned fine and calm.

Wednesday was mostly more reading, although the children and I went for a bike ride in the morning along the lake. The trail starts out as a beautfully constructed path, but suddenly stops inexplicably at a missing board walk over a swampy section, only to reappear in a less-well used state a bit further round (we had to detaour into the golf course to get to it). It looks like somebody had a good idea but ran out of enthusiasm or money part way through. On our return we detoured to find a geocache guarded by a violent blackberry bush. At least, where I was looking for the geocache was infested with the angry vines, but the geocache itself was actually nearby. We also had a parcel of mail forwarded to us by Noeline (Carolyn's mum), where I was dismayed to find a letter from the police. I had been caught doing 76km/hr in a 70km speed zone! $30, my first speeding ticket ever! When did I do that? Boxing Day? When we were rushing around Auckland trying to find a church. But Carolyn was driving that day!

Thursday dawned fine, and we decided on the spur of the moment (James was reading a book on volcanos and asking heaps of questions) to visit Taupo. First stop was the "Craters of the moon" thermal area, where James and I wandered around looking at steaming holes and boiling mud while Carolyn and the girls hunted down the Taupo library. They returned to pick us up shortly before noon and we raced to the Aratiatia hydro dam. The water is usually fed into the hydro tunnels to a distant turbine building, but four times a day the floodgates are opened and water is allowed to surge down the usually-dry Aratiatia rapids. It's an amazing sight to see a trickle that is hardly visible between boulders become a raging blue-white torrent within a few minutes. It's a sight easily rivalling the more-constant Huka falls. To finish off the day in Taupo, we drove the short distance to the Taupo Spa. A five minute walk to the shore of the Waikato river brought us to where a stream of hot water cascaded of a waterfall and entered the Waikato river. The waterfall was too hot to go underneath but we, along with a large number of others (all tourists, it seemed) found a comfortable middle ground between the heat of the water under the falls, and the cool of the main body of river about 10m away.

Friday morning brought about school work then James and Carolyn baking....yes you can bake in a caravan! Yummy chocolate chip cookies..... afternoon now. (Carolyn's added bit)

The children (and the parents!) have done some school work. Easing back into it now. We are currently in the library. The librarian (who is getting to know us now!) found an old network cable and managed to get me plugged in to the 'net. Yay. Time to read and answer my growing number of emails.