Life's a Beach

In New Zealand, life really is a beach.  The country is narrow in many places, and there is water and beach to be seen just about everywhere.  With all the water comes an insane number of boats, and it is not for nothing that they call Auckland the "City of Sails" (not to be confused with its sister city Silverthorne and its outlets, also known as the "City of Sales").

On Sunday (Day 2), we got an early start (for us anyway) waking up easily before noon.  Rick and Sue had brought eggs from the chickens Leah and Luke are raising, which we had for breakfast (the eggs, not the chickens).  Great start to the day.

Because it was a fine day outside, we all decided to take an excursion to the beach.  In an eco-friendly caravan of three cars we drove to Muriwai Beach, which is about 45 minutes to an hour from Auckland.  [Side note for the under 60 crowd:  apparently, Jack Johnson has a house there.  He seems to love NZ and performs a lot there.]  The beach is gorgeous and is broken up by a spit of land.  The waves are a little higher on one side, which makes it ideal for surfing, and people swim and relax on the other.

Surf side:

I am not a huge fan of just seeing endless sea, and one of the great things about New Zealand beaches to me is how many of their vistas are broken up by little islands at varying distances before the horizon.  More on that in another post later.

This particular beach is well known because some species of bird migrates all the way from Australia to a cliff at the end of the spit of land to nest.  The cliff was so popular that as word spread among the birds and more and more of their friends and relatives migrated, they were forced to expand their colonies to the adjacent cliffs (much like the snowbirds who flock to Tucson every winter from NY):

The bird in question:

Moving from birds to humans, needless to say, we are a very good looking bunch of people (notwithstanding the fact that some of us lean left):

With a subset of this gang bordering on the ultra-cool:

After impressing everyone around us with our good looks and hip attitude, we moved on to the swimming beach.

Some of us swam.  Some of us took in the views:

Some of us tried to escape to China:

And, some of us hid with trolls in caves exposed by the low tide:

Whew, all that activity at the beach made us hungry, and we headed for lunch (I was so hungry and lunch so good that I forgot to take pictures).  Because it was a grueling ride home (45 minutes is longer than you think) that parched our throats, we then made an unplanned stop at a brew pub after lunch.  Proving the adage that great minds think alike, the Dave/Sara/Debbie/Scott car (which was sent to do another errand) was shocked to see the Megan/Sue/Olivia car pull up for a beer and doubly shocked when the Rick/Leah/Max/Luke car also pulled up.  Awkward palm (ask Andrew or Sara), but we recovered and all enjoyed a libation or two together.

The 2011 Rugby World Cup is being held in New Zealand, and Rick and Sue were kind enough to give us a tutorial on the rules and teams later that night.  I had no idea how the game was played -- despite having seen Invictus -- and once I understood the rules, it really was fun to watch.  Sadly, the same cannot be said for either netball or cricket despite how hard Sue and Leah worked to give me an appreciation for those sports (in my defense, Rick, David, and Debbie were all asleep in various places in front of the TV in the living room during the cricket match/explanation).

Refusing to let the night end without one last thrill, Sara and I did the hokey pokey.  More accurately, we had a bowl of hokey pokey ice cream, the national dish and source of Kiwi pride.  She claimed to like the pokey but I tended to favor (or favour) the hokey.

We are working on becoming distributors in the US.

Additional pictures can be found here (no password required):  https://picasaweb.google.com/cariboulane/LifeSABeach?authkey=Gv1sRgCLiilPqm7dei7wE#.