Saturday, 2 January: What a long day. Up at 3am Eastern time to get a 5:30am flight from Manchester to Chicago, an hour or so in Midway Airport, an 8:30 am Central time flight to San Francisco, and ten hours until our 9PM Pacific time flight to NZ.  

Sunday, 2 January: No Sunday for us this year. Lost it on the flight.
 
Monday, 4 January: The ANZ flight was excellent as always. Good service, good food, and great blankets! I slept for about seven hours on the twelve hour flight. Unfortunately for Buzz, he is not able to sleep much on the plane. We stopped and got a new sim card for our NZ cell phone, collected our rental car: a 2003 Toyota Camry with 194,220 Km on the odometer, and headed to Red Beach. We were met with the customary warm welcome at the Grayson household. We had the added joy of seeing Luke, Alice and their two children. Harvard is two and was just a newborn when we were here last. Illinois is the 5 month old little girl we are meeting for the first time. It was a day of relaxing and catching up.

Tuesday, 5 January: We both slept for almost 12 hours last night and awoke feeling we are really on Kiwi time. Today was for errands and a walk on the beach at Stanmore Bay. This is one of our favorite beaches, and the walk of about a mile is a perfect way to start our holiday.

Wednesday, 6 January:  I awoke in time to see the sunrise today. The rest of the household was still asleep; so I took the opportunity for fifteen minutes of quiet meditation. After breakfast, Jim and Helen took us to Puhoi to see the land Luke and Alice have bought to build a house. It is a quite remote 40 acre parcel. Then we went on to the Puhoi cheese factory and cafe for our late morning tea. When our daughter, Laura, and I were there in 2003 it was just the cheese factory with a small retail outlet. Now it is a very "upmarket" cafe and shop. We stopped in Orewa to get our temporary AA card (Members of AAA in USA can get a free temporary membership) and some maps. I had a three hour nap in the afternoon, and we had another quiet evening of good conversation.

Thursday, 7 January: I took advantage of the windy morning and did the laundry. By the time the second lot was done in the washing machine, most of the first was dry on the line! We took a long drive today-- the technical term here is a "tiki tour". We thought to have a long beach walk, but the wind was quite strong and cool; so we contented ourselves with a drive, views of the sea, and the occasional stop,at a thrift shop. Tonight we took Jin and Helen out for dinner. The food was good, the company excellent. We are so fortunate to have these good friends who always open their home to us.