Weekend in the bush and at the beach

What a fantastic weekend just gone. We went up to Mangawhai and friends came and hung around with us.

We drove up late Saturday morning and arrived in the village around 1pm. We try to get here before the butchers close so we can pickup the most delicious meat for the BBQ. Unfortunately they are so popular that they ran out of Jef's favourite, chump chops. We picked up some pork and fennel sausages and some peri peri hot wings instead. Went to our local beach on Saturday afternoon.











In the late afternoon our friends were at our property so we made our way back there. Now, Manon, a.k.a. waldokiwi, can take some seriously good photographs. Thankfully she is more than happy to share, and she puts me to shame with how keen she is with her art. These photos all came off here camera, and without these, I'd have nothing to show for this weekend.















































No words required - the photos says it all.

Out of office

My day out of office last week was spent sitting behind a Captain and a First Officer. I flew 2 sectors with 2 different sets of crew to Wellington and back. I was there to support a digital product trial of a piece of software on the iPad.


Pre-flight checks in progress.



Taxi-ing out from the gates.



Coming into Wellington.





Coming into Auckland.





It's nice to get out of the office once in a while.

Shanghai

We were in Shanghai for a couple of days before we caught the cruise. We stayed in a hotel that was away from the touristy Bund area, but close enough that we could walk there, but also have interesting stuff to see around us.











We dined at some awesome local places where we had no idea what we was on the menu and no one spoke a spec of english. We would point at other diner's food that we liked the look of and hoped for the best.



We were walking around and saw a couple of guys wrangling snakes from a rice sack into cages that were already full of snakes. Some of those snakes seemed pretty angry too.



On the afternoon of our first day we walked to The Bund area. Any postcard of Shanghai will show this city scape.




















No sooner had we arrived and it was time for us to set off again.





We enjoyed this city very much, and when we get a chance we'll come back here for a visit.