- (photograph © Kiwidutch)
Family Kiwidutch like taking the scenic route… so we are not going to take the same route back to Wellington as the road we came north on. Actually there is method in my madness: I want Himself and the kids to see a place that I really enjoyed coming to as a young teen… The Waitomo caves.
Annoyingly this is one place I’d love to go into myself so that I can see it all again, but I remember from the previous trip that the paths in the caves were damp and care needed to be taken walking them and know for sure that there’s a boat ride involved for part of the trip too, all of which are way past any possible boundaries of ”sensible” when on crutches.
Grrr for now, I grit my teeth as we head south towards them, but on the other hand it also means we might just *have* to visit here again one day so that I can see it again when I’m fit and fully functioning. Return trips to great places? I’m all for that!
It’s nice to leave the larger roads behind and get back into the rural landscape, it’s still surprisingly busy here with trucks (always a shock after the relative serenity of side roads in the South Island) but I suppose that should be considered as normal since three-quarters of New Zealand’s population lives in the North Island.
We see quite a few signs of New Zealand support left over from the World Cup Rugby (excellent , but come on people “Be a Tidy Kiwi” and pick up that hubcap! There’s a sign for something called “Peddler’s Rest” with a bike hanging off it… and having spoken of “lanes” for stock a few posts ago, I spot two more, not too surprising since this one of New Zealand’s biggest dairy farm regions.
Little Mr. delights in a small aircraft taking off from a little airstrip near the road we are on, and I wonder at the arrangement of letterboxes that are parked on the road edge of the footpath, something that’s usual for Rural Delivery and farms (ok albeit there is no footpath next to a farm of course) and wonder why in a built up area like a town they don’t deliver letters using a bicycle and the footpath. Does this seriously mean letters here are delivered by car?
If so, it either means Posties are getting soft, or are we as a society simply no longer sending enough mail to letterboxes any more to make it economical any other way? Let’s take a look out the window and see what we see…
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
