After Fiona’s very pleasant work do at The Brigham Restaurant at Hobsonville, and after showing off Rafe to her workmates who mostly hadn’t seen the inside view before, we headed for the NZMCA Ardmore park in South Auckland to meet our old friends Gary and Chris Parkes who joined us for part of our South Island trip a few months ago.

With the sudden surge of pre Christmas work from clients, we have been temporarily grounded if you like  so we’ve been making every excuse to get away. It was nice to catch up with them again and with Alex, Sarah and the Grandies just next door to the park.

We arrived in the middle of the afternoon and after settling Rafe down, opening some vents and a little unpacking, we walked down the road to see the Ardmore Millers to watch some trampolining, some bike riding and catch up with Alex and Sarah.

Returning back a couple of hours later around 6 ish, we had the mandatory sundowners and tried to make some sense out of where we would head over the coming weeks of holidays. This turned into dinner and some cups of tea much later. A good night and nice to see them again.

Overnight we had a really solid rain and a few puffs of wind to go with it. There were decent sized puddles everywhere in the morning although fine but still windy. Gary found a leak in his roof but we suspect it might be the vent that was open for the rain overnight.

The morning tea bell rang from the Parkes truck and not long after that, Alex and Sarah arrived with Ayden and Liam.  We walked down to the Airport Café just in time to see the ole restored DC3 take off for a circuit but there cant have been too many customers as it landed after we arrived and taxied to its parking spot behind the tower. There was very little other plane movements which was disappointing. It must have been too windy or unpleasant for the small planes.

We walked back to the trucks and I spotted a nice pic of flowers and parked planes which summed up the day nicely. Our friends Roger and Marion’s Autotrail Delawere was at Ardmore park too and we caught up with some of the other regulars as well.

After tidying up Rafe and saying goodbye to all, we left after lunch and headed for home to more work this week.