raising a pergola

On Saturday we went to a friend's place in Tauranga to help her build a kitset pergola. There were 5 of us all together. It was suggested that it would only take an hour or 2. Six hours later, 5 very tired people were sitting under it. The instructions weren't as clear as they could have been. Of course they had been translated from Chinese, so that made it very much more difficult. I wonder if Chinese have trouble with kitset instructions translated from English. I imagine that they have a good laugh at the funny way the translation has been done like we do. 

It was supposed to be fine, but that conspired against us too and we got rained on. Corina went and found some very thin ponchos, that she had for something and Eddie wore her work raincoat. I had considered taking our raincoats, but decided against. Next time I will listen to my inner voice. Probably not. ha ha.

Yesterday we had a quiet day. It was tramping day, but I decided not to go. I still felt tired from the day before. I did a 5 K walk in the afternoon instead.

Yesterday was such a nice day and got to 25 degrees in the afternoon. Today it is blowing and quite cool. Only 14 degrees at 2 pm. I guess it won't get much warmer now. It is suppose to rain and the clouds are quite thick. Spring weather can be quite strange.

I have planted some tomato seeds. They have sprouted and looking very happy in their little pots. They only have 2 leaves so far, but they should be growing well soon.

A walk to the Blue Lake and Lake Okareka

Lake Okareka

Blue Lake

Board walk on Lake Okareka

Carved Punga Man  on the Blue Lake track

The Blue Lake is called Tikitapu in Maori, because the daughter of a chief lost her green stone tiki in the lake, making the lake sacred.

Lake Okareka means the lake of sweet food. In early times the Maori grew kumara there

They are both lovely lakes.

We walked around the Blue Lake first, which took about hour and a half. It's an easy walk with not a lot of ups and lovely views of the lake. It was quite busy with lots of people walking their dogs. Mostly all on the lead and well behaved. I did see one couple with 2 dogs. One on the lead the other one not. I said is the one on the lead the bad dog and other one the good dog. The lady laughed and said, you've got it in one.

After morning tea, we drove down the road a bit to Lake Okareka. This has a board walk over the swampy bits. Lots of nesting water birds here. Hundreds of Canadian Geese. Very noisy when they flew over head. There were heaps grazing the paddocks along side the lake. It must frustrate the farmer loosing so much grass to the geese. We walked to the end of the track, which is where the out let is now. It didn't have one and often flooded, so an outlet was created and the water now flows out to Lake Tarawera via underwater channels and forms the Waitangi waterfall. (thank you

Wikipedia). It was very windy at the outlet, so we went back to the seats where the wind was much less and to eat our lunch.

We enjoyed an ice cream at the ice cream parlour in Rotorua before we returned home. I had a limonetta cheese cake flavour. Yummy. It can be very hard to choose, as there are so many flavours. What a terrible problem to have ha ha.

It was a lovely day out with no rain, although it did look threatening at times.