A Hilltop Café, a Welcoming Pie and Watties…

é

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

We didn’t have breakfast before we set out from the hotel this morning because it was an early start, the kids weren’t fully awake and we didn’t have breakfast food with us.

They were happy with the extra milk we got before we set out from the hotel  but muttered that they weren’t hungry.

We figured we’d hit the road first and stop for something along the way since stopping is an inevitable part of any Kiwidutch Family long car journey anyway.

After winding around hills for a while I felt the need for a breather, Little Mr. looked up from his Nintendo game and announced he needed a toilet stop and we all suddenly decided we were hungry.

Obligingly a few more kilometres up the road we came upon a hill-top Café and pulled in.

The weather wasn’t brilliant, the wind was picking up,  the temperature had dropped noticeably and there was a dampness in the air that promised that rain couldn’t be too far off  so a hot drink and something to eat started to become a better and better idea by the minute.

We got inside and found a large group of customers, but it seemed that many of them were on the point of finishing up and leaving so by the time we ordered we had a table with a view in the front part of the café that overlooked the  car-park and part of the road  to ourselves.

Kiwi Daughter spotted meat pies on the menu and I was subsequently  tempted away from a sandwich by a mince pie with Watties Tomato sauce.

Watties is a New Zealand “institution” …  yes, basically it’s tomato sauce,  a.k.a. “ketchup” but it tastes different to any ketchup you’ll ever have had before. Himself swore he hated ketchup until he tried Watties and now he’s as hooked as most Kiwi’s are.Don’t you know that it’s a known fact that any Kiwi pie tastes even better with Watties on it?  That’s as true as the day is long.

Our breakfast certainly tasted delicious and after a rotation of family members through the rest rooms we were fit and ready to do battle with a few more of State Highway 5′s many hills.

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

A Long and Winding Road…

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

The  road from Napier to Rotorua  isn’t so very long in distance of kilometers…  meaning that if you were a bird  flying in a straight line this journey would probably be a fairly quick trip.

However,  for us there are rather a lot of hills to be negotiated and even with the wonderful anti-motion sickness bracelets to help us there will be limits to how fast we can negotiate all of these hills.

The map below shows  the red line of Provincial State Highway 5 weaving it’s way from Napier in the bottom right corner of the photo,  leading in the direction of Lake Taupo in the top left of the photograph.

The crinkles of the red line on the page will reassure you that this is no multi-laned  motorway… it’s definitely the scenic route.

Listening to the radio in the car, we have news this morning that the top half of the North Island is about to be hit by the tail end of a large cyclone that’s been wrecking havoc over the Tasman in Australia and so the  immediate forecast is rain,rain and  then cats and dogs worth of rain.

Since we can’t control the weather we will just have to make the best of it.

We have been rather lucky so far as the North Island has had a less than perfect summer so far as the weather forecasts have been concerned but Family Kiwidutch have been fortunate to have found a few pockets of sunshine as we head northwards… today it seems that our luck will run out and any time soon we can expect to run into the wet stuff.

I’m surprised and  more than a little shocked to see how logging takes place in this part of the North Island these days…  entire hilltops are being denuded,  I would have thought that selective logging would have been better for the environment, less erosion etc but this seems to be the fashion these days and whilst we did see other hillside areas full of small replanted trees,  it didn’t lessen the sadness of the ugliness of some of the scared hills we saw.

Mostly the scenery consists of hills, hills and a few  many more hills:  The Kiwidutch kids take advantage of Nintendo DS in the back to keep them occupied and Himself enjoys driving on roads that by European standards are empty and which present a more enjoyable challenge than the wide multi-laned truck-filled  autobahn /snelwegs he’s used to at home.

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)