Jumping and riding on hay bales

One week on and I'm processing the photos from the farm and they make me smile. What a fabulous weekend it was. It was such a treat to be able to have these experiences, and Kien is so very lucky to have an extended family that span several generations with connections to this farm. 100 years occupancy for the Cole family on this farm in Te Kopuru - Kien's great great granddad came from Nelson to settle here, and it has stayed in the family ever since. We've always enjoyed visiting here.

We arrived on Friday night and set up camp out the back in the garden. After a pot luck dinner/good old fashioned BBQ, most of us climbed onto the trailer towed by an extremely powerful tractor for a tour of the farm.

Flax darts at the beach

The following day we headed out to the beach.





We stopped for a bit of flax dart throwing.





Kien spent ages making his very own.



Then we went down to the beach.





On the way back up the track we were all a tad too heavy for the tractor to take a corner going up the sandy track, so we hopped off to lighten the load.





All aboard again, back to the farm we go.

Hangi

We were in for a treat! Karen had organised a feast for Saturday night in the form of a hangi. In the morning "The Hangi Master" Richard dug the pit as we were heading to the beach.



When we got back he lit the fire.





After 3 hours the food went down, and then 3 hours after that the big reveal.









Delicious!

Racing and jumping on hay bales

I love running on hay bales, and so does everyone else! The kids and I had races back and forth. It was so much fun.















Fabulous sunset on Saturday night.



An even better blood moon.



It was a truly amazing weekend, and now I'm sifting through all the footage I took to try and piece together something that resembles a documentary (or similar). SOOOO many gigabytes worth of data to be processed. It makes me smile listening to some of the stories :-)

Laying of ashes

Cremation is not part of my family custom, and I've only ever been to one burial of ashes (Jef's grandmother's). A couple of Saturdays ago I experienced my second time laying ashes, this time it was for Jef's great uncle Mostyn. We drove up to Te Kopuru to a quaint little cemetery.

It was a beautiful ceremony, informal and intimate.









There was a lovely memory garden in the corner of the cemetery, and while a few of the family went there I chased wild pink clover. They were beautiful, and grew all over the ground.



We went back to the farm for afternoon tea afterwards. As always everyone had a good time, especially the kids.





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We stayed the night at Kien's granddad's and Margaret's, and in the morning Kien ran around their garden in pyjamas.





We hadn't anticipated a late start to the day, but it ended up being that way, and before we knew it time had marched on and we needed to head back to Auckland. Our journey home was along the coast, stopping at any beach we could when the rain wasn't falling.





Needless to say the beaches were pretty empty - just the way I like it.









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Wow, the cold snap has finally hit us, and all of a sudden it turned cold. I miss the summer already.