Day 8 Four doggies

This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures. – Rudyard Kipling Kim

13th January 2023

We left the hotel at about 9.00am to pick up our rental car so that we get on our way. First stop, my long-lost cousin Lynette and her husband, Ron, in Howick.

When we got to their house, we received a very excited welcome from their two sweet little dogs, Molly (pink collar) and Ruby (red collar) who are both almost 13 years old.

It was so good to reconnect with Lynette and to meet her husband. The genealogical journey of discovery that I have been on since last January has given me the joy and privilege of reconnecting with family members with whom I last had contact many years ago and had thought lost to me and of finding new family connections heretofore unknown.

I felt an immediate bond with Lynette when we first connected several months ago through the mutual Ancestry match that was identified after we had each done DNA tests and that connection just continues to strengthen. I am very glad that meeting Lynette in person has only confirmed that affinity and feeling of kinship between us. I think that Lynette feels the same way.

We had a very nice lunch with Lynette and Ron at the Howick Village Cafe – lovely food and even better company. Unlike the picture from their Facebook page, below, the HVC was absolutely heaving and it is clearly a very successful and popular lunch venue.

After lunch, we took our leave of Lynette and Ron and continued our journey to Taupō to see Michael’s brother, Peter, and his wife, Jackie, and daughter, Kirsty. The distance between Auckland and Taupō is about 280km and it took us just over 3 and a half hours. We will be staying with them for the next four nights.

We had a very pleasant drive through lush countryside and were fortunate to have temperate and clear weather. The most striking thing about New Zealand thus far has been the huge blue, blue sky that seems to arch vastly overhead. An ever-changing pattern of dramatic cloud formations flows mesmerizingly across that enormous blue panorama creating a stunning and constantly shifting canvas of different shades of blue, white and green.

We were feeling a bit tired so we stopped off for a quick bracing coffee in a small town called Tirau in the Waikato District, north of the intersection of State Highways 1 and 5, where the traffic from Auckland and Hamilton on State Highway 1 splits to go either to Rotorua on SH 5, or continue along SH 1 to Taupo.

Tirau is set among farmlands but has become a very busy tourist stop and, for a town with a population of less than a thousand, it has a surprisingly large number of , shops, boutiques, cafes and restaurants.

We finally arrived in Taupō shortly after 5.00pm to another excited doggie welcome from Anika and Zinnia. Anika is three years old and Zinnia is a year old so, being of a younger generation, their greetings were even more enthusiastic than the ones from Molly and Ruby this morning. Anika belongs to Jackie and Peter and Zinnia to Kirsty.