Jack and Katrina's Place

You could be forgiven for assuming the purpose of this blog is to share photos of our son with our wider firends and family. Actually it was sort of intended to be wider than that, to detail and record all of the things that we as a family are doing, thinking and experiencing. It just happens that for the last two years almost everything we have done has involved Guy, or the good bits anyway. Nonetheless there has been another aspect and that is to record and acknowledge the wonderfulness that is all around us. I hope you can see what I mean in these pictures.

The ferry boat shown in the last post took us to the town of Russell which is on a penisula in the Bay of Islands. We walked a kilometre or so over the narrow neck of land to this beach. Here's a photo from the 'summit' looking back (west) toward Russell and across the water to Paihia on the mainland. Over on the ocean beach, Guy spent a lot of time exploring the coarse grainy sand and then took me by the hand to negotiate the rock pools out at the point, 'There's a waterfall!'" he kept exclaiming as the small waves splashed up and drained off the fissured rocks.

Looking out at this Bay, I recalled , from travelling across it, that most of the world doesn't look like this at all. To a first approximation, most of the world is hot, flat and dusty, the rest of it is cold, flat and swampy. The bits that are nice are mostly full of people, and the half nice bits, have people fighting over them. So just how lucky are we? to sit in the shade of a mighty Morton Bay fig tree, eating marmite sandwiches and watching the endless interplay of small waves and smaller boys, backlit by an empty shimmering sea. It's what Rudyard Kipling meant when he described New Zealand as 'last, loneliest, loveliest' .

The sunset, from Ken & Kerry's after the storm.