9 March 2013

Another sunny day in Paradise

What a brilliant day. It's about day 60-something with no rain (which is serious: they finally got around to declaring a formal drought in almost the entire upper North Island last week), but it was another gorgeous cloudless sunny day. We're daughter-free this weekend: this morning was spent running around looking at bathroom fittings (after a lateish brunch, mmmm, eggs Benedict!), but this afternoon was much more relaxed.

We headed up to Tauranga on a sheet hunt in the late afternoon, after the bottom sheet of our favourite set of sheets finally gave up on us. We decided that we'd rather replace just the bottom sheet if possible rather than the entire set when the top sheet and pillowcases are all still really comfortable and lovely, and when we looked around in Rotorua we couldn't find any pure cotton sheets sold as separates - but one of the staff at a shop here sent us up to their shop at Mt Maunganui who had LOTS of stock of really nice separates. We found a perfect match for our current sheet sets which is great (and less than half the price of replacing two complete sets of sheets, which is what we were looking at otherwise). We also found a Lush shop (mmm, Lush), which unfortunately is closing in a week's time (grrrr!) which means our closest Lush will now be Hamilton. There's always mailorder but half the fun of Lush is smelling your way around the shop. I completely love their bath ballistics and the awesome thing is they are so huge that you can chop them up and they will do about 8 big soaks in the bath... Lovely.

We then had a lovely walk along Papamoa Beach, and I'd forgotten how much I love the sound and smell of the sea. There is something about the sound of surf which just sucks up all the stress and washes it away; it was also blowing a fairly stiff breeze and that's pretty much the first time we've felt real wind since we left Wellington. It was good, good, walking along the beach, smelling the salt air, feeling the warm sand, and hair whipped around by the wind. And it is such a beautiful place too, with the Mount all misty in the distance at the top of the beach. We had fish'n'chips up there (very nice piece of gurnard it was too!) and came home enjoying the sunset over the lovely plains around Te Puke. We finished up with a soak in the hot pools under the stars at the Polynesian Spa, which is one of my favourite places in Rotorua. Very very nice.

So now I'm sitting at home, feeling very mellow and relaxed, and thinking it might be about time for heading to bed.... Funny: one day of doing chilling out stuff with hubby and I feel like I've had a 3 day holiday. Brilliant.

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