We had a great few days off wth Frank and Monique in Russell, about 4-5 hours north of Auckland. Here’s some highlights…

The beach is pebbled instead of sandy.

A really big tree.

Uncanny and suspicious resemblance.

It took us a while, but we coaxed this friendly churchyard kitty onto the grave of poor Kitty Walsh, who died aged 2 yrs 7 mos in 1892.

Should the brave men of the Hazard have known better than to board a ship called the Hazard?

Sunday roast at the Boating Club.

Ignominious punishment in the “hellhole of the Pacific.”

We went to La Cigale market yesterday and ended up with a bag of feijoas (the little green ones), Brazilian passionfruit, and a mixed bag of hot peppers.

Feijoas are a common backyard tree here and when they produce they really produce…

Feijoa flavor is hard to describe… very perfumey smell, sweet and citrusy… They don’t keep for long once picked, so most of them end in jam or pies.

Our new Rodriguez tandem is great, but both the front and rear engines are a little underpowered. So, we walked the rest of the way up to the top.

Someday we’ll perfect the art of the selfie.

The Auckland War Memorial and Museum all lit up for Lantern Festival.

A couple of weeks ago we got to see the annual Lantern Festival, a celebration of all things Chinese held in the Auckland Domain.

The lanterns themselves are really cool, like whole dioramas depicting something that probably means more if you grew up with Chinese fairytales than Grimm’s. For instance, the brave shrimp above is surely a known character… but not to me.

There are kiddie carnival rides, multiple music performances, a massive array of food stalls, and lots of other stuff. But the real stars are the lanterns… beautiful.

I’m always on the lookout for messages that seek to influence current affairs and people’s attitudes to somebody’s advantage. In the past, this would have been called “propaganda,” now it’s just “fake news.” And advertising, I guess.

I found plenty of that kind of thing at the Lantern Festival (whether intended or not). To oversimplify: China is great, in all kinds of ways, and has been for a long time. So, therefore, you should go to China on your vacation. And if China itself, or Chinese persons, want something you should probably give it to them. And so on. Hmmm. But then again, any US county fair is at least that nationalistic… so maybe the secret messages were all in my head.

Hedges are popular and impressive here. We’ve speculated about how exactly they all get trimmed.

For this one, it’s enough to stand on your truck. Other hedges we’ve seen, especially on country roads, are much taller. But they’re still perfectly trimmed. We still have no clue how those get trimmed… drones?

The former Whau Lunatic Asylum, as seen on a recent Sunday morning bike ride. Like in the US, there has been a movement here to deinstitutionalise the mentally ill, although the related problem of homelessness is either less or at least less visible.

Today, the facility is mostly occupied by Unitec, which seems to be basically a community college. Probably still a lot of craziness.

What I grew up with as brass tacks in the USA are called tin tacks here in NZ. But I can’t remember ever naming a park after the brass version.