We doddled all morning in our motel room. No hurry. We’re going to sit tight here for a week. No reason to rush. But wait! I thought we were going to go to the Len Lye museum (across the road from our motel) to see a ‘show’ at 11. Oh, oh, we’d better hurry.

Actually, the ‘show’ (called “Flip and Two Twisters”) is an exhibition that plays daily at 12 noon. We were an hour early, just in time to sit in the beautiful theatre inside the museum and watch a 45-minute film about the life and art of Len Lye. The film was very helpful. We’d never heard of this New Zealand artist before. We’d seen his “Wind Wand” here on the Coastal Walk in New Plymouth. Now we were introduced to more of his art.

At noon we all lined up in front of the large space where the feature exhibition was on display. Two 20 foot bands of stainless steel hang from the ceiling. Between them is another length of steel in the shape of a loop. Motors ‘twirl’ the ribbons of steel so they jump around and make loud clanging sounds. It’s too bad I didn’t keep some of my old broken Lufkin measuring tapes — the bending and twisting steel reminded me of that.

The museum itself is an incredible building; the exterior is all wavy mirrors. Like our first B&B host said to us, it’s a beautiful building, probably more interesting on the exterior than any of the exhibitions inside.

After a morning of art lessons, I was starving. We stopped by a busy sushi shop and got a carton of sushi to take back to our motel. After lunch Sue tried to catch up on the sleep she didn’t get last night. I listened to music on my phone and had a short snooze as well.

Later in the afternoon we went out for a walk. We walked all the way along the fantastic Coastal Walkway, past the Fitzroy Golf Course where we golfed yesterday, and turned around when we reached the Te Rewa Rewa bridge.

The walkway continues but we’d walked for just over an hour one way and decided that was enough for this afternoon. Good thing too — on our walk back it started to rain lightly. It actually stopped raining when we got back to New Plymouth but only momentarily. We got home and Sue looked through the menus in our motel room. She sent me out (across the street) to pick it up. By the time the pizza was ready and I came back to the room, it was raining quite a bit harder. And then, while we ate it, it POURED. Apparently the forecast is for rain everyday for the next 5 or 6 days. Too bad; we saw an outdoor concert advertised about 2km from us here, out in a park on the coast. It looked like a fun time, but not if it’s raining!

We watched a couple more episodes of Fargo on Netflix tonight, and then the CBC National before going to bed at around 10:30.