Trucks, earthquakes and buon apetito!

Once we had taken in the views sufficiently from the top, we walked down through the woods to Oriental Bay, off-roading slightly by mistake down a steep track that had Debs and Jen reminiscing about precarious tracks Dad has taken us on in the past - 'We'll get down much quicker this way', 'It's perfectly safe' etc, etc!

Oriental Bay is a man-made beach, and has to be rebuilt regularly as the tide and current carries the sand away! Today the trucks and diggers were busy ferrying the sand from one end of the beach to the other - what a thankless job!

We went for lunch in the bay and then ticked off the next big Wellington tourist attraction, Te Papa (meaning Our Place), the National Museum. The most exciting part of this museum is the 'Awesome Forces' section, which has really cool interactive displays about earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves. I remember finding this all really interesting when Nige and I came here 7 years ago, but now I actually live in an earthquake zone, it was really quite frightening!

We also tested our virtual water-skiing, wind-surfing and dragon-boat racing skills - me and Nige won the dragon-boat race :-P !

Afterwards, we had a wee beer in the Wellington Brewery and did a bit of shopping and then home to get all dressed up for a posh dinner. As we will miss Neil's 40th birthday in January, we took Neil and Debs out to Il Casino, allegedly one of the best restaurants in Wellington. We had gorgeous Italian food, sipped some quality vino and sampled their famous desserts and hot chocolate!

Happy Birthday Neil, matey - have a good one!


Building the beach!