A Weekend in Karitane

(Note: Now that Elena is here and blogging and jobless, her blog is getting updated much more quickly than mine.  Feel free to read it as well - http://curlygirlabroad.blogspot.com/.)

This past weekend, we headed up to Karitane, a lovely little (very little) beach town that sits about 30 minutes north of Dunedin.  A fellow OUSAer, Stuart, owns the cutest holiday home there and was kind enough to let us ( Todd and I, Vanessa and Elena, and Kitty and Dan and their dog, Chian) borrow it for the weekend.

We got there early evening on Friday, but since it stays light until about 9:30pm, we headed to the beach for a walk.  Stuart's house sits right on a little inlet and about a 5 minute walk away from a beautiful beach which, like every other beautiful beach we've been to, is completely deserted and feels like your own!

We woke up to a beautiful sunny day on Saturday and spent the day doing everything you should do on a sunny, summery day - walking on the beach, diving for Paua (Dan did that, but they were all too small), kayaking, lying on the lawn reading your Kindle, eating fish & chips, playing with the dog, taking naps in the sun, and getting nice and tanned and maybe slightly burnt. It was perfect.

 It was probably for the best, particularly for our skin and chance of getting skin cancer, that Sunday was a warm but cloudy day.  We felt no pressure to sit in the sun and get more burnt.  As Dunedin is often cloudy, you do feel pressure to be in the sun whenever it in shining and slightly warm.  Instead, we went for a walk around Huriawa Peninsula, where there used to be a Maori village back in the day.

We hit a local market day on the way home (we LOVE these and they happen everywhere and all the time), and Todd and I finished the day at our friend Mark's half birthday party.  We met even more cool Kiwis and thanks to Gordon and Mark's top-notch hosting, we had lots of good things to drink but no idea how much, so we slept well that night. ;)