Happy Easter!
We had a lovely weekend. We attended Whangarei Anglican church for a rousing Easter service. Again, we found the parishioners friendly and welcoming, and we felt fortunate to worship in person even if we were a bit creeped out with the insistence of other worshippers that we should shake hands. Hand sanitizer flowed freely!
Then we drove over to Frances’ sister Helen’s farm for a delicious family Easter lunch and to stay the night. It was so good to be together that we neglected to take a photo of the gathering and the feast, so you’ll just have to take our word for it. (But everyone put in a brief cameo appearance on the weekly Trask Family Zoom.) We do look forward to being together with our stateside families when it is safe.
This is a busy season on Helen’s farm with new calves being born practically every day. The area has been experiencing an extended drought, so Helen is feeding out silage to her stock to supplement the meagre grazing. Silage is pasture grass that has been ‘pickled’. It has a sweet smell. The grasses are cut and then fermented by being wrapped in plastic bales to keep as much of the nutrients (such as sugars and proteins) as possible. Helen uses her tractor to grab and distribute the silage. Frances got to be the lacky opening and closing gates etc. Helen’s ability to make the enormous tractor do what she wanted was very impressive.
The new little calves are awfully sweet. Most are bottle fed. Helen acquires newborn calves from other farmers who don’t have the time to raise them, as well as from her own cows. We don’t really want to think about what happens after the little calves become big. Photos of some animals on the farm (sorry: pigs, chickens, and peacocks didn’t make the photos.):
Interestingly most of New Zealand commercial establishments are required to be closed on Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Anzac Day (April 25). But local councils can issue exceptions on Easter Sunday. Practically everything was closed during our drive down to Auckland today (Easter Monday, which is a public holiday), but once we arrived in Auckland, the streets were teaming with shoppers.
Our latest accommodation is a pretty cool apartment in an alley, behind the panel beaters. It’s spacious, comfortable and modern and the wifi is excellent. It’s the sort of place that you’d never know existed, just a stone’s throw from the Westfield mall, which was really humming this evening. This mall could be in any city in the world – yes, that kind of mall. Having missed lunch, we were ready for dinner, which we found at a Turkish restaurant on the roof of the mall.
We went for a bit of a walk this afternoon to get our bearings, walking over to the Auckland Domain and the War Memorial Museum. We were not in a museum mood though, so we took in the fernery and the wintergarden and just enjoyed being outside.
Jim gets his pre-departure Covid test tomorrow morning, then we’ll have a bit more time to explore.