Trip to Palmerston North
A couple of weeks ago Sarah won an action for some second hand pool parts. Our pool, bless it's little fake inground-ness has these metal rails that sit on top of the rubber pool liner and give it a bit of a better appearance. But for some reason they made these things out of metal, which of course over time combined with water and chemicals, well they rust. Some of ours have rusted quite badly. Anyway Sarah won for $200 a whole pools worth of replacement rails, some of which have surface rust but none of which are totally eaten away like some of ours are. So the plan is to sand them back, paint them up (maybe coat them to death with anti-rust or similar) and to put them on the pool so it looks a lot nicer.
The problem with winning the action was that the pickup was in Levin, which is ~3 hours drive from Napier. So what the hell we thought, we might as well make a little weekend of it and stay in Palmerston North for a day. Friday night we drove down and stayed with Wendy and Rex in Danniverke. Amy, Kaden and Maddie came over and Beth and Maddie had a fun night playing and talking. Theo crashed out happily in the port-a-cot in our room. Saturday morning we got up and headed into Palmerston North. The usual road you'd take was closed a couple of months ago when a massive landslide took out the road, there's talk of it never reopening. The second road that you take was also closed on the Saturday for us, so we had to take the 3rd and crappest way to get to Palmy! Oh well we made it in the end, even though there were lots and lots of windy roads and we thought that Beth would be sick. Thankfully she managed to hold on and wasn't sick.
We arrived in Palmy and were able to check into our hotel a bit earlier than we were supposed to, which was nice. We took the kids for a bit of shopping and some lunch to the nearby plaza, then we took them back to the hotel for a sleep. Theo I was pretty sure would go for a snooze but I wasn't sure that Beth would, but once I'd left to go and pickup the pool bits, Sarah texted me to say they were both fast asleep. Beth would have been super tired because she'd been up to nearly 10pm the night before talking and playing with Maddie. I zipped down to Levin to pickup the bits, it's a 45min drive each way which wasn't a problem. The guy selling them was really nice, gave me a few pointers like "never drain all the water out of your pool because you'll never get it back into shape again!". I drove back and everyone was asleep this time, so I waited it out in the hotel bar with a couple of cold beers. Eventually everyone woke up and we went out for dinner, the first couple of places we tried were full booked so we eventually settled on a visit to Bethany's, a local well known Palmerston North restaurant. It was hard going though, kids and dinner out never works well. 3 trips to the toilet with them, loud yelling and complaining about not wanting to eat their dinner etc etc. Eventually we were finished and they went for a run around outside to burn off some of the ice cream and to look at the coloured rainbow wall. We got back to the car to find out it'd been fully pooped on by all the birds nesting in the trees above. Poop indeed! We went back to the hotel, got the kiddies into bed then I went and took the car to the carwash.
Sunday we went for breakfast over in the hotel, packed up the hotel, then went to inflatable world for a couple of hours of bouncy castle action and fun! Beth was a bit unsure at first but got really confident to jump on and off things. Theo loved it too, but wasn't too sure when other little ones were around, he liked to have the castles etc to himself. Which was fine when we first got there, but by the time we were leaving 2 large birthday parties were in full swing and kids were running around everywhere.
We drove back to Danniverke, thankfully this time Saddle Road was open, which while still a goat track was a lot better than the other road we'd travelled on. We stopped in to see Wendy and Rex again for a couple of hours before waving goodbye to Danniverke and Farvel and heading home. With lots of questions from Beth about Farvel. To quote Wikipedia "The Dannevirke after which the town was named is an extensive Viking age fortification line in Denmark which had a strong emotive symbolic role for 19th-century Danes, especially after the site had fallen into German hands in the German-Danish War of 1864 - a recent and very painful event for these settlers." - The upshot of this is they have at each entry/exit to the town a large viking on a sign. When you leave the Viking has the word "Farvel" written under him. This is Goodbye/Farwell in Danish. Anyway we called the Viking Farvel, because well why wouldn't you. And Beth had lots of questions: Does Farvel live here? Does Maddie visit Farvel? etc etc. He was the topic of somewhat concerned conversation.
We made it home and got Theo into bed straight away. He woke up again at about 5pm and was then back in bed asleep about 6.
And today they sent him home from Kindy because he's got conjunctivitis. I swear we haven't had a normal week with them at Kindy for about 2 months now. Poor Sarah is going mad trying to get work done, one of them always needs to come home! Having sore eyes would explain why he woke up last night in tears though, poor little chappy.
And now it's Monday night, Sarah's upstairs doing a parent centre handover to a new person and I'm writing this on the couch. Then going out to do the rubbish, joy.
Tim