urban daisy

What do you get if you cross a Bengal with a Burmese?

Well, kittens of course!!

They arrived last night.  There are now six bundles of furry sweetness residing at my mother’s house.  Oh, the joy!

Mulberry stained, still sandy from the sand pit, and having just liberated a flower from Grandma’s garden, Blossy shares a moment with Max.

Taken on a briskly cold, morning walk.

We spent yesterday at Lamington National Park.  Stopping to view the bird feeding, the Chicklette was accosted by this curious rosella.

It was not long before Blossy’s afternoon tea was forfeit.

With the arrival of a second parrot the battle for the biscuit was waged over her head.

With the interloper vanquished, the victor settles in to enjoy a bite to eat.

Possum fur is delectable. It’s hard to believe the New Zealanders don’t think possums are cute, but they are an introduced pest over there, decimating the native flora.

See Blossy’s glazed loook?  We are all wearing that. Holidaying is hard work, and everyone is exhausted.

The first day in the snow was on the Remarkables.  We were assigned teams, and I confess I felt a little sorry for the competitive minded men in our team.  Having three little girls on your team was a bit of a disadvantage in this event.

The second event was mini golf.  Yes, seriously.  No one in our team was able to hit the ball in the hole, so even when Blossy absolutely decided that she must participate, it couldn’t harm the scores too badly.

We had twenty minutes to design and build an emergency snow shelter, with points awarded for practicality, creativity, and how many people would fit inside.  Here, the little girls were quite useful.  We managed to fit 8 people in our shelter

Can you imagine hurtling down the mountain on an inflatable tube?  Everyone loved this activity.  It was a definite for the do again wish list!

The last event for the day involved assembling a sled and dragging the smallest member of the team up the mountain.  It was no contest.  Our smallest member weighed about 25kgs, and the other teams had men of around 80kgs.  Dragging anything up the mountain at a run is …(insane, if you ask me..) challenging, but an 80kg man was just too much.  Our team was the only one able to finish, and so having the little girls turned to our advantage.   Winning this event clinched the day for us, and while the more adult members of the team celebrated with schnapps,  the little girls all received a furry kiwi toy that makes a noise when you press it (I assume it is the noise of the bird.  Whatever it is, it’s enough to drive you nuts after a while.)

I have no shots of the last event as by this time Blossy had exhausted her interest in the great snowy outdoors.  So while our team rode to glory in the final event, Blossy and I were winging our way back to relative warmth of the ski cafe.

Today, the rest have headed out to Coronet Peak to ski.  Blossy and I have spent the morning at an underwater observatory, watching ducks on the lake (they have cool ducks here!) and I’m hoping she will be up for a cruise around the lake later this afternoon.  You could easily spend a month here and not exhaust the possibilities.  Adventure sports abound and the scenery and places to explore are grand.  It has been very hard to see so many beautiful and amazing things, but have no time to stop and photograph them.  Being with a group (this is a corporate activity rather than a family holiday so the girls and I are just tagging along) is a different experience for me, and it has been interesting to say the least.

I thought that a two hour wait between flights would  involve a lot of sitting around.  Not so!  Certainly not if you enter New Zealand with a set of hiking boots in each of your six (!) suitcases and you declare that you have visited a farm in the last 30 days.  It was an exercise in patience to unpack each of those six suitcases before the airport audience, pull out all the hiking boots, have them inspected, treated, and returned good and clean (and WET) to pack back into the cases.  That all pretty much covered the two hours nicely.

New Zealand, at least the little bit of it we’ve seen, is a place of  magnificent beauty.  I will never joke about it being just  another southern state of Australia again.  It really is unique.

This lake is across the road from where we are staying:  the mountains are “The Remarkables”.

I wish we had planned to spend more time here.  So far we have been very busy with the activities our hosts had planned for us (which have been great), but I yearn to explore some of the heritage listed national parks in the area.

Today we spent the day  at the snowfields.  It was cold.  It’s very, very cold here!

I hope to catch up with everyone when I get home.  :)

I’m not sure why this pelican chooses to frequent the dam.  We are not so far from the coast, and. .. he looks a little out of place in a rural, bush setting.