Blog is another year older – that’s 5 years now I’ve been rambling away. Take a look at my first week of posts back in 2004. A rather tentative start. But in that lot of posts you’ll see the first Sunday visit to Nikau and the first rave about their date scones! God, that’s 5 years ago?

Will have to see if the Mister can extract again how many blog posts I’ve done since I started. People sometimes scoff at me because I don’t do Facebook – quite apart from the fact that they won’t let me be Orange Girl, I don’t need it, I have my lovely blog.

Some time later: the Mister saved his ‘how many blog posts are there?’ script and can report that as of today, there are 1230! That’s a lot. And considering this time last year there were 868 I’ve been rather prolific this year!

Sad news last night that Bevan’s father died suddenly so he’ll be coming from San Francisco to Gisborne to sort things out this week so we’re going to head up there to see him. I have not been to Gisborne since I was a teenager – last time to be billeted with a religious family on an orchestra trip – so it’ll be interesting to go back there.

I don’t think I ever realised exactly where it was. As a kid we always came from the direction of Opotiki, through the gorge and to a town bigger than Opotiki with more shops, including the infamous everything store Williams & Kettle (not sure if it’s still there) and a town clock. And it took maybe 1.5 – 2 hours. Have never driven up from Wellington. It’s a long way. Well, maybe as far as going to Awakeri. Up through Napier (which we’re familiar with) but it looks like a scary winding road after that. A journey according to the AA of around 520km which takes just over 6 hours (undoubtedly with a safe driving speed of 90km/hr and rest stops every hour).

So, road trip! Hoping for good internet, good coffee (seems there are a couple of cafes using Supreme beans!) and some of that sunshine they have so much of. The pictures of hotels and motels we’ve looked at on the web have ‘rural’ scenery out the windows. Will be really good to see Bevan again although under sad circumstances.

We don’t watch regular telly much but it’s on now while I’m tapping away, the movie Blade Trinity is on. They must flip a switch at 9pm to allow the F word to be said out loud. Not long after the movie started at 8.30 we heard an FBeeeep (and queried it, not sure that TVNZ usually blocked it), and then in the last 20 minutes it’s been fuck fuck fuck fuck everywhere. Must be someone’s job to scroll through any movies they’re going to play and beep out the occurrences that are going to occur during ‘family time’.

Very impressed with the pork and spinach paella last weekend, and with a bit of the special rice left over we tried a more traditional chicken paella tonight … well traditional but without the shell fish!

It was great, although the saffron flavour really needs salt to sharpen it up (we’re still not cooking with salt). We had a big pot of chicken stock on the boil too – smells wonderful.

Saw the cutest thing at Moore Wilsons today! The guy who grows their broccoli up the coast was in store with crates of broccoli at a special price and had a couple of baby broccolis (?) growing in buckets.

We went up for a closer look, the Mister having grown up in the city hadn’t seen a broccoli before, so we got chatting to the guy. He said that Moore Wilsons had had quite a bit of feedback that the new store was quite clinical, not as ‘fresh from the garden’ (which is what we’d thought) so he was there with his growing storeys, real wooden pallet that fits on the front of a forklift and lots of dirt. To show us all that vegies do still come from the farm.

After the shopping we went back to Gotham for some date and caramel cake. We saw it there at breakfast (not sure if they usually have it, but we’d not seen it before) and didn’t want to miss out, especially not with the great coffee they make.

Me in my attempt at red white and blue clothes in honour of July 4th (hard with a closet full of orange and black!), oh and a close up of the DELICIOUS cake.