First over-night on the section
It's been a long time coming - almost a year since we bought the section, but last weekend, Nick, the boys and I had our first night sleeping over at Church Bay. Nick was with Richie who was rowing in a regatta all day, Henry was working on preparation for his art exam, so I was in charge of getting our newly-plonked-on-the section cabin rooms set up. With much excitement I loaded up the car with containers of plates and glasses, basic kitchen equipment and assorted essentials, and on Saturday caught the 12 noon car ferry from Half Moon Bay to Waiheke. I spent all afternoon making up beds (literally, heaving a Queen size bed around screwing in legs and putting on the mattress etc), hanging a mirror in our room and being the nutter that I am, even put a bunch of daisies I took from home, in a jar on a corner table. I was too nervous to plug in the power in case I set fire to the whole place, so had a quiet day with just a group of pesky squawking magpies for background music.
Nick, the boys Maggie and Dougal (the Border terrier and Westie) arrived on the 5pm ferry from Auckland. We raced back up to the section so that Nick and I could show the boys our progress, and they seemed suitably impressed (not quite over-whelmed, they are teenage boys), but certainly pretty happy. Some dear friends of ours also have a place on Waiheke, and were out last weekend too, so we were thrilled to have them come over to join us for takeaway pizza from Stefanos with a bottle of champagne and a couple of red! Well all was going terribly well until the temperature dropped to what felt like below freezing and Maggie embraced her terrier roots by capturing hedgehogs and running around with them in her mouth every 5 minutes. We battled on! With jumpers wrapped around our heads and jackets and woolly jumpers on, we refused to give in - we admired that setting sunset and ignored the potential risk of frost bite for hours! OK, probably hardier souls may not have found it too bad, but I think we had just slightly under-estimated the full camping nature of our set up! As we said goodnight I was so excited to be hopping into bed with the stars and night sky view visible through our curtain-less windows. The dogs were also pretty excited about this, and at the opportunity to bark at every hedgehog, rabbit or other beastie cruising around the section during the night. After much swearing and grumping I wedged their dog beds down the side of the bed to block the view and they, and us, finally went to sleep. The next day Nick and I headed down to Oneroa beach to give the dogs a run, then I couldn't stop myself from doing a bit of ineffectual weeding, just so that I could feel connected to the place. Finally it was time for the inevitable tidy up before leaving for the return ferry. Complete with barking dogs and frigid wind it was wonderful, and I can't wait to do it all again.
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