31.1.09

Raglan '09

On Saturday morning (January 24th), Lowell and Julie trucked it to Raglan (popular surf beach/town) to meet Marc & I for the long weekend.

Marc called Julie and Lowell on Friday to indicate our whereabouts, and said, “I have bad news and I have good news. The bad news is that there isn’t a single camp site available in Raglan. The good news is that the owners of this campground like us and offered us their personal spot… at a discount to boot.” For some reason the lovely hosts fell in love with Marc and his charm and ended up giving us an emergency spot even though the entire time we were in the office they were turning people away on the phone and in person and a membership to the Family Holiday parks to boot! Score!

Sweet as!

After scarfing down some lunch, we rushed to the beach to BOOGY BOARD and generally just bum around and have a good time.

Time for the ever graceful handstand series. C'est Julie...

Aaaaaand moi...

Mmmmmm... tasty dead jelly fish.

Allow me to zoom in on that for you...

(We have no boogy boarding pictures because we were having way to much fun catching the waves to plod back to our stuff to get a camera.)

4.5 hours later, we returned to our campsite, rinsed the caked mud off our bodies, and trekked into town to relieve our hunger pains.

I took this opportunity to take close-up pictures of Marc and Julie's faces as they both had an obscene amount of sun-induced freckles.

After dinner, we took a little bit of a detour en route to our campsite and enjoyed the lovely evening weather and the beautiful view.

We also played a little bit (while Marc tried different camera settings on our flashy new camera)...

(The blurry blueish blob is none other than Marcus).

(I am evidently part turquoise ghost).

AND JULIE WENT CROSS-EYED! Julie is only able to go crossed eyed while concentrating EXTREMELY hard on her finger.

Unlike Marc and I . . .

Upon returning to Gus, we ended the evening off right… with Tim Tam Slams.


The following day we headed to the Raglan Food and Wine market.

It was super festive…and also extremely HOT. Thank heavens for sunscreen, hats, and SPF 50!

After wandering and sampling little treats, we purchased a random little supply of goods and devoured them under the shade of a big ol' tree.

We also purchased a delicious little Mexican treat . . .


The next day we got up early and headed to a surf lesson! Julie, Marc and Lowell did amazingly well. They stood up like pros immediately! Me not so much but I still got up. All in all a great weekend filled with sun and fun!
I think this is what I looked like most of the time surfing (the above picture not the below one!)





27.1.09

Tongariro Crossing

Hello everyone, we have been having some internet issues, so here are some pictures of our volcanic hike last week. The volcano is featured in Lord of the Rings as Mount Doom. Text and more pictures will follow later this week . . .