A month of traveling - and lots of sewing!

We've been away for most of April, one way and another.  We had two weeks' with Martin's parents in Whangārei, followed by 10 days at home then a week in Taupō and Napier.

Here are a few highlights from Whangārei...

Kamo fizzy spring

 

 

Hāngi by the beach in Onerahi 

 

We got to Onerahi via a gorgeous shared cycling/walking path that goes through a corner of Whangārei harbour.  They've re-purposed what used to be a train line from Onerahi to Whangārei, so it's very flat and reasonably wide, and it was fun biking along with trees overhead and mangroves to either side.  On the way home we stopped at the camera obscura (which was fascinating - I hadn't seen it before, but Martin commented that it was particularly good on such a sunny day) and also happened across an incredible mechanical clock :-)

Making Easter eggs with the whānau, trying out my new Matariki cookie cutter, and sewing

 

 

 

It was also good to just spend lots of fairly chill time with Martin's family.

For the Whangārei trip we had regular seats on an Intercity bus; for the Taupō/Napier trip we were mostly on Gold seats.  We'll definitely be buying Gold seats again.  For the short-ish trip to Whangārei I don't think they would have made much difference, but for the long trip to Taupō (and the trip all the way home from Napier in one hit) they made it ever-so-much more copeable.  I was able to lie well back and zone out for the whole trip, and was strong enough at the end to comfortably walk home from the local bus, despite having been up around 10 hours at that point!

On a regular seat - heading to Whangārei

On the gold seat heading to Taupō - so much more room!

Taupō/Napier

The main purpose of the trip south was to support my friend Heather at her baptism :-)  Her road to faith has been long, and it was so exciting that she's got to the point where she wanted to take this step - and so neat we were able to be there.

We were also there for Heather's birthday and were able to join her family for a special birthday dinner :-)

We stopped in Taupō for two nights on the way down; partly to break the journey (we hadn't been able to get Gold seats on the bus for the journey down) and partly to catch up with my friend Temi and meet her new daughter Idèra.  I very much enjoyed lots of baby snuggling :-)

It's been a lot of travel, and I'm glad to be home and am looking forward to having more of a routine back.  However, doing it all by bus worked well.  It was more expensive than a car would have been (especially as we couldn't be all that flexible with dates, and made some of the bookings fairly late), but it was a really comfortable way to travel - at least in the Gold seats!  I really enjoyed looking at the scenery through the big bus windows, especially watching the misty mountains on the Napier/Taupō road on the way home.  We live in such a beautiful country!  It was also pretty low carbon - we were responsible for about 125kg CO2e across the two trips (roughly what the planet can absorb per person per year), basically all of it on transport.  It would have been roughly twice that if we'd done the same trips by petrol car.

Sewing

All that time chatting with people meant I got a lot of sewing done :-)

 

The one I'm most pleased with is this sashiko coaster and placemat set.  To be fair, I started this well before we went to Whangārei and finished it just after we got back from Napier, but probably the bulk of it got done on this trip.  It's been an immense effort (including making the pōhutukawa coaster twice as the first one ended up very not-square...), but I'm pleased with how it's paid off :-)

I also worked on:

A new summer-weight cycling cap for Martin to replace on that got nicked!  You can see some of the sweat-band in the middle photo - it has his name and phone number embroidered on, which has helped to get one such cap returned in the past :-)

A flannel for my niece who loves horses.

An Amish puzzle ball for my friend Temi's baby daughter Idèra.  It's made of 12 'wedges' that are joined into three circles - see this blogpost for more info.