Pics and more

Spyke's 'broken' foot

Tai looking way better than he did.

Silly me!!!!! I was looking for a couple of pics to upload and as I was looking through my photos I realised that I DO have things to talk about!!

The Rugby World Cup

Currently the RWC is in full swing over here. This weekend is the quarter finals and up until now it has been just great. The atmosphere is buzzing and people are just having a lovely time. :-)

I took the opportunity to go to the opening celebrations at the waterfront here in Auckland, as did 199,999 other people!!!! It was MAYHEM!!!! I ended up spending about an hour and a half sitting outside the railway station waiting for Tina who was catching the train in (I had brought the car in that morning and managed to park it not far from the waterfront). It was really interesting sitting there watching all the people wandering past.

Once Tina and her friend had arrived we headed down Quay St towards the viaduct where the big screens were. This was NOT a good plan as the other 199,999 other people seemed to have the same plan. We ended up in a massive crowd where you just couldn't move unless everyone moved and it actually got quite scary. We did however eventually manage to extricate ourselves from the throng and were more sensible in our route choices after that. We ended up sitting over the Wynyard Quarter (a new addition to the Viaduct) where we were able to watch the opening ceremony on a big screen and we had a FANTASTIC view of the fireworks. It was amazing!!!!!! We stayed for the start of the NZ Tonga game (had to see the hakas) and then shot home to watch the game on my new, fab-u-lous 42 inch LCD tv. :-) It was a really neat evening and would have to be the best fireworks I have ever seen in NZ.

Trip to New Plymouth

I also had a whistlestop trip to New Plymouth with Tracy. She was over from Melbourne so we grabbed the opportunity to go down and see the latest Estcarp litter. We shot down on the Saturday afternoon, dropped in to the motel, popped in to Pukekura Park to see the lights (they are on for the RWC), caught up with a bunch of people for dinner and watched the end of the Australia Ireland game which Ireland won!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!

On Sunday we headed to Midhirst to huggle puppies before racing back up to Auckland.