Epod's Birthday in the Bay of Islands
This entry was posted on 12/7/2006 5:19 AM and is filed under New Zealand.
How to celebrate your 57th birthday in New Zealand two times...Go
to a beautiful lodge in the Bay of Islands. Sleep in, have a
delicious omlette breakfast, do yoga, go for a lovely hike and then
have a communal dinner with 8 new friends.
The hike...
The settings for dinner...
A bit of dinner to tempt your pallette - the rest was all equally gorgeous and yummy too...prepared by chef Peter.
And the grand finale... a special birthday Pavlova - a unique New
Zealand treat made of meringue, whipped cream and fruit. It was
actually quite delicious, and an amazing feat to prepare...hail to the dessert chef Glennis!
Two of our dinner companions were from the USA also, but all the rest
were from the UK. Though it takes 12 hours to get here from
London (it took us 15), this seems to be a favorite vacation spot
for the Brits. We really enjoyed our conversations with them - a
great way to meet people we never would have.
The birthday celebrations continued the next day of course too, seeing
as our Dec. 8th was Dec. 7th back home, so still an official birthday
date. We went off to Waikari for a round of golf which was great
fun. There was a very la-de-da course a bit further north called Kauri Cliffs, number
#49 most beautiful course in the world, but it was about $500 per
person, without club rental. It was late in the day and we knew
that we'd be just as happy playing on the funky course without having to drive another hour up the coast.
There were even a few beautiful ocean view holes on the Waitangi course...
We "hired a trundle" and clubs and had a great time. Cows watched us tee off. No bathrooms - no poison oak in the woods either.
Ball washers had no water - dry wash? There were two holes punched in every green???? One with a flag and one without. Does that mean we get to choose which hole is closest to our ball? Another strange thing about the course were the "yardage" markers
which were all metric - though seemingly still measuring the common yard
distances we know. Very strange...
The evening finished off with another exquisite dinner back at the lodge - two happy birthday days for the E-Pod and her pod...
