Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary to us! One year down, many more to go.

We drove down to Tauranga on Saturday morning, after shoving the cat outside with a large bowl of food and her bed.

Tauranga's a much nicer drive than Napier is, it's only a couple of hundred km away. Annoying it was pissing with rain the whole way, really badly. Once we arrived it wasn't much better either, you couldn't even see very far because of the mist and the pouring rain.

We met up with Holly and Adrian, Sarah and Holly went off to the wedding dress shop so Holly could try on her wedding dress, Adrian and I went down to the cafe to grab a bite to each. We then all headed over to the suit hire place so Adrian could get all fitted and kitted out for the big day.

That done we went and grabbed a bite to each and then wandered around central Tauranga for a bit. It wasn't that much fun in the rain, so we headed over to Mount Maunganui for a bit of a look around and a couple of quiet pints out of the rain.

Later that night we headed back out for dinner, as you can see Saturday was pretty much a write off!

Sunday we leapt up and danced around (not really) because it was our Wedding Anniversary! Presents were exchanged, be both thought we might out-present each other but I think at the end of the day it was a draw. I made Sarah a little booklet with photos from our year together, underscored with a badly rhyming poem. Sarah had got a book printed which is a bunch of the fantastic photos from our African travels. It's really amazing, it's a properly bound book and the photos are just superb. The photos look good on the computer, but they look ten times better when they're printed out and bound in a book.

Present exchanging over, we checked out of the hotel and met up with Holly and Age back over at The Mount. We then did a bit more shopping before stopping in to visit Sarah and Holly's family friends for a couple of hours.

The drive back up to Auckland was much nicer than the drive down, it wasn't pissing with rain thankfully. When we got home Tui was waiting for us, it seems she survived her night sleeping outside without issue. She's a tough ol' mog.

Poor Sarah has woken up with a sore throat and feeling sick today. I hope it's nothing major, poor girl.

Sarah has added a new banner to the website, see if you can spot it in rotation. There was a second banner that she made, but I declined to install it. But you can view it here for posterity.

And finally: In 2000 my Mum took a stuffed Shaun the Sheep that I'd given her as a present, on her climb to the basecamp of Everest. She documented his travels and gave me a book called "Shaun's Fecking Treking" at the end of the journey. This is a scan of that book, enjoy, it's amazing.

Tim