On Shaky Ground

Another average week dawned to a weekend of beautiful weather!! I somehow managed to wrangle a Friday off, and the family I'm staying with and I headed down to Napier and Hastings to visit extended family. It was a foggy drive through some more very windey roads for about 3 hours South along the coast. Napier and Hastings are nestled beside each other (kind of like K-W), and keep a steady watch over beautiful Hawke's Bay. The towns have lots of interesting architecture and a great sea-front focus as they centre around dark-stone beaches. On our drive in, we passed a busy port and through the two towns to the Slade residence. The Hastings crew was a great, friendly bunch and I felt right at home!

The view of Napier on a hill on the way into town

 

The next day we all went for an art deco tour of Napier, great way for us all to see the city in a new light! Wait, art what? In the 1930s, a large earthquake in the area made some significant changes to the area. The earthquake plus the resulting fire pretty well leveled Napier and brought the land about 5 feet out of the sea (bye-bye existing beaches and harbour, hello new beach and a lot of reclaimed land). During the rebuilding, the preferred building style was the modern one of the time - art deco! So, all the buildings have that plaster/concrete look with lots of geometric patterning and decorative designs and because it's NZ, many of the designs have Maori motifs.

An art-deco upper store front in downtown Napier.

Overall, it creates a really neat effect in the town and you can see it all over, especially when a wonderful tour shows you what you're looking for. After the great walk, an historic video of the earthquake,  and a morning coffee break, we went for a drive. Most of Napier is built on a low-lying flat area, but there's one very steep hill near the centre of town, and we went for a wild ride to the top to  see the sites - I would not like to learn to drive around there! The houses were all quite lovely and colourful (I love NZ houses for some reason, I think it's because they all look so full of character) and we got a great view of the port area from a park at the top. After getting the lay of the land from this direction, we headed back through Hastings for a different view. I've realized that New Zealander's favourite way of showing off their country is climbing the nearest and tallest hill, and I must say I quite like it! (Not kidding though, no matter where I go, it seems to be the mandatory thing to do, Auckland, Gisborne, Hastings, Whakatane, Tauronga… :) The hill we climbed, okay drove up, in this case, was quite the hill! It offered an absolutely beautiful vista of the many, many other hills in the surrounding area, and of the Hastings/Napier Hawke's Bay area in general.

It's a bird, it's a plane, nope, it's up a hill!

 

On our way home, we visited a swampy estuary, and it was very cool to see all the birds and native vegetation preserved just next to the highway. After that full day, we spent our evening, of course, watching rugby!!! Including a world cup 7s game which Canada won, not versus the kiwis of course… the kiwis later won both the men's and woman's championships!

The estuary swmp!

 The next morning, I made some good old Canadian pancakes and we went to a memorial service for one of the members of the Sir Edmund Hillory's (a kiwi's) Everest climbing mission. The memorial was for George, the photographer and a Hastings native. It included speeches from his family and friends, and lots of stories about his Everest, Antarctica, etc., adventuring days. Very, very cool! And also held in a very beautiful church. We then left to get back to Gizzy and had a beautiful drive back stopping for lots of scenic pictures (most often at the top of hills), and at a hot springs to check out the area and take a wee trek in the native bush. Thanks to great hosts for a great weekend!