Napier, day 2

I’m writing this from the hotel room, two sleepy children resting their heads on my shoulders. It makes my arms heavy to type.

It has been a magnificent day here in Napier. We spent the morning wandering around, playing at the park as Michael went to have a meeting at the DoC office here and Rob went to finish the novel he’s been reading (part of the Ender’s Game series—very hard to stop once you’ve begun!). Then, after lunch, we all headed to Te Mata Peak (where Keith, our trusty travel agent) had directed us. Ahhhh, more of the spectacular New Zealand. We scampered up cliffs covered in sheep poo and over ridges that were both so magnificent and also so dangerous we knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore (Rob kept saying what I had said on our first bushwalk—that they’d never allow this in the US because the odds of getting sued were just too high in the US when someone walked over the edge). We watched two paragliders get their equipment just right and then jump off into nothingness and have the air hold them up—and bring them higher, circling and circling into the blue. We drove down the hill and hiked around the bottom. There were lots of native birds and plants in a trail that wound its way down past sandstone caves and up through the green towards the burnished straw colour of the higher elevations. We found a stand of redwoods dwarfing the native trees and then, after reading the plaque, discovered that those trees were 4 years younger than me (which made me feel like I’d been needing to take more vitamins all these years as my mother always told me).

There are things to say about the wineries, about the turning leaves, about the hills which give way to the blue Pacific. But tonight there’s just a glass of wine and a Jacuzzi, and all in all, it looks like a pretty good life.