Elaine and I are spending the weekend In Hawkes Bay, at my friends Roo and Maree's. We just had dinner at "The
Old Church" restaurant; lovely food, excellent service and a wonderful atmosphere. Very 'through the looking glass'.

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I finally broke and did something I swore never to do. I bought a iPod... In spite of this meaning that I had to load iTunes onto my PC I definitely like my new toy. :-)

I was thinking of getting the iPhone but after using the Touch I am disinclined. I have isues with the operating system - os3 finally has cut and paste but the implementation sucks and frankly the Pre's handling of running multiple apps simultaneously is vastly better. It could really do with a undo function too.

However it is very shiny, I can play Myst and I m posting this from a café while waiting for Elaine to arrive to see a movie... Life is harsh... :-)

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Over the weekend, a group of us (includingsoon_lee  and carlthulhu) walked the routeburn track. It was a real experience, though we could have dome with slightly drier conditions :-).

The routeburn is a 3-4 day tramp that runs from Glenorchy at te tip of Lake Wakatipu to the Divide (on the road to Milford Sounds. It starts in beech forest rises to about 1300m then skirts an alpine range before descending back into forest again. Spectacular views in good weather, and lots of amazing waterfalls when it rains. I don't have many images as my camera spent a fair amount of tiime in my pack, to keep it dry. Earland Falls were especially amazing, horizontal spray so forceful it went straight through the waterproofing on my coat.

A couple of pics...

On the Routeburn track

Some of the party on day 2, on the track to Harris Saddle.

the alpine garden

The alpine track, starting the descent from the saddle




 

Ruapehu_20071227_130517-DSC_2558
Originally uploaded by mike_harre.

A couple of days ago the café and a shed containing three snow groomers were burnt to the ground in a suspicious fire :-(.

Everyone up at the ski-field are pretty upset but they say it won't affect the season opening this year. They are looking at setting up a temporary shelter for people to get their coffee.

The thing that gets me is apparently someone would have had to hike up for an hour and a half each way to set fire to these. Hopefully they'll nail the arsonists if it does turn out to be deliberately lit.

in the interests of beating soon_lee to the punch, I've uploaded some pics from the Vintners brunch to my flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_harre). :-)

Just a taster (so to speak... :)  

 

 

Monsoon Poon's 25 Herb and Spice Curry. The most interesting match of the day. the wine was Coopers Creek SV Marlbourough Pinot Noir 06. The curry pretty much overpowered most of the notes in the wine, leaving the fruit and a hint of spice, which did kind of work. However, I think the wine is too good to be overpowered like that.  

Lots more pics on my Flickr page.