Share and share a bike
These OnzO bikes turned up a couple months ago. Auckland was relatively late to hop on the municipal bike share concept, but OK, better late than never.
The OnzO idea is interesting in that you don’t have to return the bike to a docking station… you just park it, lock it’s self-contained lock, and walk away.
I signed up for the app.
It seemed like there weren’t enough bikes to be really useful in my daily life, and so I hadn’t actually rented one yet.
Then over the New Years break, they added a whole shipment more bikes. I was so impressed on January 2 that I took a screenshot of my route to and from work…
Every yellow dot is a bike… there was one every fifty meters!
But a week later, where did they all go???
Neat idea, but more work needed.
Why-heke
Waiheke Island sits just a few miles off the coast, but for complicated microclimate and zoning reasons has turned into a significant wine production and tourism destination. You take a 40-minute ferry ride, then bike or bus or scooter around from beach to winery to shoppe all day and come back in the evening. Or, you rent a house and do the same thing for longer.
I can see the appeal… it’s beautiful. But we went on New Year’s Weekend, one of the absolute busiest days of the year. It was hot, and crowded, and it turns out wineries and shoppes on Waiheke (none of which are more than 20 or 30 years old) look an awful lot like their counterparts in other places.
Next time we go, it will be for the company we are in, or for a longer stay at a non-peak time.
Give me a sign
I was pretty excited when I found this particular corner on a recent walk… it’s actually the intersection of Vermont St. and John St.
But the signage was incomplete, as is often the case here.
Turtle-sitting
My boss went away for a few days over Christmas and I offered to feed the turtles. But these turtles are known escape artists, so I had to try to find them just to know I hadn’t lost them.
Luckily they didn’t get loose on my watch…
Christmas break fun
So we went to see The Greatest Showman. Should someone have been obligated to warn us it was a musical? Anyway, on the way home we walked by the other theater and decided to see The Last Jedi. Bonus: theater 2 has a bar!
Happy New Year 2018!
We are too old and boring to stay up until midnight most New Year’s Eve evenings, including this one, and definitely not up for being part of the giant crowd out on the square. The fireworks shot from the Sky Tower look wonderful on the video, and maybe even better than they would have looked in person… it seems like one of those things that would have looked great from a drone’s perspective.
But we’re still fond of the idea of ringing in the New Year, so we decided that we will celebrate with Vermont, which occurs at a very civilized 6 PM January 1 for us…. just about an hour from now.
So, to everybody in the 802 and elsewhere in Eastern Standard Time……… Happy New Year!!! We miss you a ton (but not your winter weather). May your 2018 be safe and healthy, and chock full of love, joy, and new adventures!
One man’s trash
We have walked past this house several times without really seeing it. Or the old car rotting away underneath. Spooky!
There must be quite a story… the land alone, probably a tenth of an acre, would bring a million bucks more or less, even with a house to tear down.
Birkenhead
Another weekend, another suburb… last Saturday we struck out to the north to take a look around Birkenhead, located on Auckland’s North Shore. We had planned to take a ferry across, going under the big Harbour Bridge, but they don’t run on Saturday morning, so onto the bus for us, where we got to drive over the bridge instead.
We had a nice cafe breakfast, cruised through some second-hand shops, and then went for a walk in the park that stretches from the center of town right down to the water.
Biggest tree stump ever.
The view back to Auckland.
The sugar refinery. New Zealand was never part of the big sugar economy that so shaped the Atlantic nations, but Kiwis do love their sweets: lamingtons, pavlovas, Jaffa cakes, Pineapple Lumps… the list goes on.
This plaque memorializes a young man who crashed during a longboard race down this road. It is a sweet piece of road… I can totally see why they would hold a race here.
Then back up the hill, where the same saxophonist who sometimes plays at our own farmers market was backing a singer doing a Christmas set on the square, and into the bus, and home again all in the same day.
We’ve only got another couple dozen of these trips to go before we have to start venturing out of Auckland!!
White Christmas???
A cottonwood tree, or something like one, is close enough to a white Christmas for us this year.
Christmas pirates
Pirates live in this cute gingerbread cottage down the road from us.
Now that your rose is in bloom, the garden edition
Our suburb, Parnell, is famous for its public rose garden overlooking the bay. 
Christmas Ride
I showed up for the usual Sunday ride only to realize it was the annual Christmas ride/party. Luckily, there was a spot for me on Team Cowboys and Indians.
The goal was to ride to five different spots based on photo clues. As it turned out, they were all beaches… not a bad way to spend the morning.
Some teams were more prepared with costumes and so on. It wasn’t exactly a race, but yes it was. We weren’t last to finish, but it was still difficult to be beaten by cyclists wearing tutus and reindeer antlers.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 