I've been a bit of a busy beaver this year. I'm pretty sure I'm working harder then I ever have before, and part of that means going away a bit more than usual for various training events. This weekend, I needed to be in Taupo for a Saturday morning safety management training day. I could have gone alone, and leave Marty to the kids yet again, but that's no fun so we made it into a family holiday instead! As you may know from previous blogs, we are pretty good at road trip holidays. The kids have never been on a plane (except with jaimee's starship trips) and we don't go away for weeks every year (excepting a yearly trip to see family in Auckland). We just can't do it with church weekend commitments and crazy accommodation costs. So instead we like to do big day trips - to the snow, Rotorua, Palmerston,....and today to Taupo! We cram as much fun as we can in a day and call it our family vacation for the year.
The kids had a blast during the training in the morning - they made best buddies with the kids who had also come with parents from Tauranga, playing happily in the church crèche as I discussed child abuse and training policies in the room next door. The kids were so entertained by their new friends that Marty was able to join us adults! The girls tell me this was a super fun "part of their family holiday" when they were recalling the things they did in their day!
We had a lovely lunch in a local cafe, where the kids were delighted to get a kids box each,containing juice, sandwich, mini choc and small bag of chips. Pretty perfect for our kids appetite level. Then we headed out to "mind junction" (used to be called puzzle world), which we had often driven past but never stopped at before. There was a whole range of options to do, shooting simulator, flight siimulator, mini golf, a lego display....we let the kids choose one thing each to do as well as the maze. Luke and Jaimee chose to control the trains, making them go faster and slower as they raced around the track.
Kate chose to join daddy for a turn at the remote control boats, there were lots of giggles as she worked out how to move her boat around the lake!
Next we all headed outside to do the maze. You each get given a clipboard, and have to try and find the 5 animals, 5 questions and 5 answers hidden throughout the maze. This added a lot of fun to the whole maze, even when we found the exit we stayed in the maze until we had found everything and then matched the correct answer to the correct question! Poor Kate got separated from us right at the end, but other then that it was just heaps of fun.
Next on the agenda was a stop at Huka Falls, another spot we haven't been to with the kids despite driving through the area often. Kate was a bit nervous of the noise of it, but all three kids (and us) just watched the amazing rapids for ages. We talked about Gods great power in this creation, wow, it really is a sight to behold. And what do you know, we even ran into a friend from our church at the falls! NZ just isn't big enough to devour us all huh?! We then finally went to De Brett's, which the girls had been waiting for since we left home at 7:45am that morning! The soak was just lovely, it soothed Luke's cough and totally relaxed us all. Kate and Luke love soaking in the hotter pools, while Jaimee likes to swim and splash. The private pool at the end of our time here was a nice way to finish. I felt like I had had 3 wines after all that hot water! It was dinner time, and we all wanted to eat somewhere cozy after being warmed by the pool so we finished our big treat with a trip to Lonestar for dinner. We very very rarely eat at restaurants, but we knew the meal size meant we could just order sides/starters for us and we got 2 kids meals to split between the kids. We all ate our full, us adults didn't need pudding and the kids got free drinks and pudding with their meals so it all worked out reasonably, whew! I was impressed with the way get looked after the kids, giving them cool colouring sheets and felts that all worked well (the man handing them out instructed the kids to stay in the lines and use up all the ink!). Marty did a lovely colouring job. Hehehe. The kids were all asleep within 10 minutes of heading home, no doubt dreaming of hot pools, waterfalls and mazes.
.....Holiday over as we arrived home at 9:30pm, and not even a suitcase to unpack!
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