East Coast rolling

This is herself gamely plodding onward & upward towards the most easterly lighthouse in the world. Its a hell of a climb, with steps all the way, but she made it. If you enlarge the picture, you will see the lighthouse at the top. It used to be out on an island called, strangely enough, East Island, but it was too difficult to service it with the notoriously fickle East Cape weather, so they dismantled it, moved it to the top of this hill & automated the whole shebuggins







This is Herself standing by said lighthouse. I must at this point, apologise for the quality of the picture, as our poor old, well travelled, much used & abused very second hand digital camera chose this of all times to expire with a shuddering gasp & accompanying wheeze never to function again, so this photo was taken with my phone. Its quite an awesome feeling standing up there. The whole East Cape area has a very moody feel about it & apparently the locals guard the hunting & fishing rights quite jealously.

From there we made our way back along 20 km's of dirt road with an added hazard. In the evening, the cattle come down off the hills on to the flats & that includes the road. Its very picturesque. I'm sorry I have no pictures at the moment, but they are still in my trusty old 35mm SLR camera. If they are OK, I will share them with you at a later date. We had a lovely tea at the motor lodge, sharing it with the Fultom Hogan road crew who were there repairing the road damage from the winter storms. That should have told me something there & then.

The next day saw us head off bright & early for Gisborne. It was also my birthday, so we had reserved for the night at a very upmarket motor lodge called The Senator. All went well till just south of Ruatoria. We came around a corner & the back passenger wheel dropped into a particularly savage bit of washout in the road. before we could blink, both back wheels followed by the two front wheels were off the road & into a patch of greasy muddy grass heading ass backwards into a ditch.

We were very lucky. The only damage was that Herself bruised her calf muscle quite badly. Sherman survived intact. The only real damage was to my ego at having to be dragged out of the ditch by a very friendly power board worker who happened along in his ute. We proceeded on our way like a James Bond martini. Shaken not stirred. From there the road went inland only coming to the coast for brief periods at Tokomaru Bay & Tolaga Bay.



This is the view that we had from our unit at the Senator Motor Inn. The lady there was absolutely wonderful to us, giving us a unit on the ground floor to make life easier for Herself. Very kind of her. I must admit that it was very pleasant to sit out there in the sun drinking coffee & watching the world go by. Oh, we bought a new camera in Gisborne as well.




Later on we went for a walk along the Marina. This is the MV Takitimu, a lovely old wooden launch that thanks to the generosity of local businesses has been fully restored. She now spends her days doing two two hour harbor cruises a day at $15.00 a head.

I caught up with an old Fire Service buddy that I hadn't seen for years. Bernie told me about a reunion there in November. Herself says I should go , but I dunno. It could get messy. In the morning, I took this pic of a couple of outrigger canoes training in the river. I like it a lot.


From there we saddled up & headed for Flaxmere, for a couple of days with Muna & Tony, but that rates another post on its own.

OTHER NEWS

herself went through to Waikato Hospital yesterday. They changed the PEG tube for a MICKY button. This means that instead of having a tube hanging down, she now has this neat little plug like an airbed valve. It all went very well & we managed to catch up with Estelle Our support lady from the Motor Neuron society & had lunch with her. Its always a pleasure to spend time with her as she is incredibly helpful & supportive. Today, Jude's brother & his lovely lady came down for the afternoon. It was good. Trish has made Jude a badge to wear on her chest . It reads, "I am not deaf & I am not stupid. I just have a motor Neuron disorder." A very thoughtful thing to do. Anyway, will do some more later. Bye now