Saturday at Leisure 

We did a lot of nothing yesterday…

Walked to the La Cigale market for fresh veggies. Our route takes down a couple pretty streets and through a park that includes a tiny little tropical rain forest. My photo skills are challenged when I try to capture the lush oversized greenery. Here’s a house perched on a hill overlooking that little park. 

On the way back, we happened across a coin show in the nearby Quality Inn hotel and stopped in. In my youth, I was quite the coin collector, started off by my grandfather who brought back coins from around the world during his Air Force career. I lived for several years near the American Numismatic Association library and museum in Colorado Springs, and would hang out there looking stuff up. 

But since then, my enthusiasm for that kind of collecting – and for hanging out with other collectors – has cooled. This little show, celebrating the 50th anniversary of NZ’s monetary decimalisation, was just what you might expect, only maybe a little smaller and more pitiful. Hotel conference rooms are the same everywhere, as are the gray-haired, bespectacled men with loupes and catalogs who love old money. Barely in the door, we were enthusiastically accosted by a gentleman eager to share with us the shocking, scandalous story of the Bahamas mule, including binders full of photocopies of previously classified government documents and press clippings from that scandal. Fascinating… for an eleven year old version of me. We didn’t stay long. 

We turned some of our new veggies into a salade kiwoise, added a lovely French pastry (Bastille Day and all) and had a midwinter picnic lunch on our little balcony. 

After that we set out to finally go touch the ocean. It’s maybe a mile walk, but we just hadn’t done it yet. 

They are working on the normal pedestrian walkway, so we had to detour through the lovely little St. Stephens Cemetery. 

I wonder if there’s an ICD-10 code for schooner mishaps. Probably. 

Then, past the Parnell Baths, closed for winter, to the sea. 

Lots and lots of people sailing. 

We walked some more, stopped for a pint, walked some more, and got home for dinner. Don’t know how many steps we would have logged on the step counter, but it was enough to be dozing in front of the TV by about 8:30. 

Not that we’ve been suffering by any stretch, but it was a milestone and a great feeling to have no more pressing settling-in tasks on our plate and just really take the day completely off. 

And now, on to Sunday!