The summer of storms
It's around this time of year that you'll find me writing my blog wrapping up what we did over the summer holidays. But this summer was a bit different. Because we didn't have one. What we had instead was the Worst Summer Ever (official title). Lots of rain, plus flooding and a tropical cyclone.
There were super high winds smashing against the house so hard I was worried the windows would blow in and my cukkies would get wet. Hard to make sandcastles when the crazy strong wind is blowing all the sand off the beach!
It rained all day for a week – so much rain that the park we used to walk around and kick a soccer ball on was completely flooded. Some nights Mum and Dad would get up in the middle of the night to check how high the water was outside our dining room in case they had to rush out with a bucket to stop it coming into the house. Finally the storm stopped and we felt like the summer had been so lame that we needed a mini break.
We drove down to the Awhitu Peninsula to visit the lighthouse there. It seemed like we must have been driving in a big circle though, because it took nearly 2 hours to get there and then when we arrived we could see the Sky Tower in the distance - which we can also see from our house! After 2 hours in the car we were about as close to the Sky Tower as we were when we left the house!
Lighthouses are always cool though, so it was worth the journey. It was the first lighthouse I’d seen for real and it was fun walking up the stairs inside it to the light at the top. And we got to have a swim on a nice, peaceful, deserted beach. Well, peaceful until Dad started popping seaweed to squirt us with seaweed water anyway.
While we were there we also walked around these big water gardens and had a ride on a steam train. Not only did we get to ride on it, we got to have a look in the engine too. It was boiling hot in there from the fire which the driver had been shoveling piles of coal into.
That holiday also introduced us to another “Worst Ever”: the Worst Motel Ever. From the outside it looked like a dump, but actually, when we got inside, we found it was… still a dump. Most of it looked like it hadn’t been updated since it was built back in the time of the dinosaurs. The bedroom me and William shared had a bunch of flies buzzing about the window. Even they were desperate to get out.
Even though it felt like it was officially the worst summer ever, we did get to spend some time in the sea between all the wind and rain.
The other thing we spent a lot of time doing on the beaches was looking for sea glass. Have I mentioned that William is crazy about sea glass? He looks for it everywhere. As soon as we get to a beach, he's walking around with his head down, searching for more of it.
He's got a pretty impressive collection now - so much of it that him and Dad decided to turn some of them into a piece of art. So with Mum's help, they created this pretty cool-looking fish, all from sea glass, with a small shell for an eye. Glub, glub...
So that was summer. One where we could literally say we had a wild time - certainly wild weather anyway. But luckily we didn't have any flooding, and the house survived the strong winds fine. And of course, it all gave me a chance to spend more time indoors reading, and I'm never sad about that.
