We slept in until about 8 o’clock and didn’t come out of our room for breakfast until around 9:30! After breakfast we went for a stroll around the neighbourhood. The stroll turned into a pretty serious walk — around the park behind our B&B, then up along the main street right up to the main intersection, and then back to our place — all-in-all about 5kms. Then, after doing a bit of computing, we drove back into Taradale town centre and walked through the downtown. Not a lot of choices as far as places to eat. And the stores that had some of their wares out on the sidewalk — well, it all looked a little ‘junky’. We had a sandwich (a muffin and cappuccino for Sue) at one of the cafes and then headed back home.

Sue read and did her exercises while I worked on a web project. I was looking through one of the brochures for ‘What to do’ in this area when I came upon a listing for a concert at one of the local wineries — James Taylor will be performing outdoors on the grounds of the Old Church Winery on Sunday, Feb 5! Well! Are there tickets? Yep, some general admission tickets are still available. We should go down there and check it out. It’s only about a kilometre from here.

So at around 3pm that’s what we did. The ladies in the lovely winery restaurant couldn’t really help us — but they DID show us the big green field where the concert would take place, and although they couldn’t sell us the tickets (we’d have to do that online), one of them took a photo of Sue and me hanging out with JT!

We left the winery and headed down to the Napier Golf Course. After 3pm the rate is $15 for 9 nine holes. We each bought an 18-hole round. And we had a lovely time. The course was in quite good shape (although it’s been very dry here for quite some time, the fairways were mostly lush and green). No waiting for us — and no pressure coming up behind us either. Really, we had NO excuse not to golf better than we did! But we had a lot of fun. By the last few holes I was really dragging myself around the course — what with the big long walk in the morning and the walks and golf yesterday — and my feet were aching.

We drove back into town and stopped at a ‘fish ‘n chip’ shop. We took the food home to our place and ate it outside in the backyard.

Our lady had left for the evening. Her dog was whining in the living room. Sue was texting with Val Funk — making arrangements for the Tongariro Hike — a 19.5km hike across some volcanic mountains that we’ve talked about doing. The Funks want to do it on Friday and invited us to join them. It means that we need to book a B&B in Taupo for Friday night (which Sue did) and delay our move into Graeme and Robin’s apartment until Saturday. In the meantime, I booked us tickets to the James Taylor concert on Feb 5. So that means we’re hanging around Napier until at least then — a total of 3 weeks. But really, everytime Sue looks at the weather anywhere around us — even Wellington, which is only about 4 hours south — it is cold and rainy, while we have sunshine and wind!