Ruawai to Oweira

The morning started with an inspection of the milking parlour at Paul's farm, luckily all the cows had been through it and we were treated to viewing without any animals. This was a huge circular parlour which could hold something like 75 cows at a time.

We also got to look at the new slurry pit which was being dug which was about the size of an Olympic  swimming pool.

The parlour was not the highlight of the day however. Next we were off to the kumara(sweet potato)
Packing plant where Sally's niece showed us around, we saw the washing plant, the grading room and the packing process. Sally's father had been one of the first to grow kumara, however at the end of a scintillating tour we weren't even given any free samples. However we were given some pens and some recipe sheets, which was very kind of them.

Onwards to the kauri museum with an entrance fee of twenty five dollars each.this didn't sound very interesting but in fact held us spellbound for almost three hours. The history of the kauri tree and its valuable gum used in varnish Lino and paint was extremely interesting. One of the exhibits was a boarding house with different rooms showing different occupations, dentist, doctor, gum buyer etc.
One room was taken up with digging the Kauri gum out, another as a saw mill and there were several interesting gum exhibits. the gum looks very similar to amber one of the expedition manager's favourite gemstones. Luckily we didn't buy anything.

Outside of the museum we visited the pioneers' church and an early school. All in all avery interesting trip. As we were running late we had a pie in the cafe opposite the museum, which was OK but that is about all.
The trip to Orewa was fairly quick and we booked ourselves into the Hibiscus Palms motel.We had a walk along the beach and went to the supermarket for some much needed supplies, before Matt and Hayley came and joined us for the evening. We all went for a Thai meal which was also a little disappointing, in that it had no heat whatsoever. All in all this had been a pretty bad day for food.
We all returned to our motel room and spent some time chatting on our verandah, before Matt and Hayley went home and we all retired to our beds.