What A Week!

What a week! You've all heard or seen news of the bush fires in Australia. What a huge disaster that is! The pictures above are from our papers here, but I'm sure they've been all over the world. The temperatures in Australia have been extreme to begin with, and then the fires have been burning for days. The authorities suspect arson, and for that reason, are considering most of the area a crime scene. So there’s no way to get aid in at this point. Rather than send in people, the church is sending money. Later on when recovery efforts begin, there will be a major ongoing work parties, similar to the Katrina/Rita stuff we dealt with in Houston. But the kind and length of help needed isn’t even known yet. There are hundreds and hundreds of families who have lost everything, including family members. We have either sent or received literally hundreds of emails and dozens of phone calls between Australia, New Zealand and Salt Lake, just trying to keep everyone in the loop.

And then just the opposite problems exist along the upper east coast of Australia where they’ve had major flooding for the past couple weeks, with whole towns under water there. Apparently, neither fires nor floods are uncommon to Australia, but to have them one on top of another keeps us on our toes. First we had flooding in Fiji, then the Solomon Islands started flooding, then Australia, and then the fires hit. Whew! How is everyone at home set up for emergency supplies and storage??? It pays to prepare for whatever the problems in your region may present!

To complicate things, our supervisor, Steve, wasn’t feeling well on Tuesday morning and decided to go have things checked out. He was admitted and they're running tests to find out what further action needs to be taken. So Dad has had to step in and work his role for the time being. Lucky that he’s had a lot of disaster experience before.

We received an email from Bennie Lilly, who has been the person in Salt Lake over emergencies in the Gulf Coast Region for the past several disasters, and who was bishop of Lewisville I the same time Dad was bishop of Lewisville II. They have asked him to go to the Dominican Republic for the next three years to be the Area Welfare Manager there. That includes such places as Haiti, Cuba, etc., the places that get hit so hard with hurricanes and tropical storms. So he will be living right in the middle of that, rather than “visiting” it for a couple days, as he did in Houston. They’re excited to go and anxious for the experience. He said when we were done here, we could go to the Dominican Republic and be his Area Welfare Specialists! Umm, we'll see...maybe.

Okay, so things have broken loose, work-wise here. But before that, we had another three-day weekend. February 6 is Waitangi Day, the day the Maoris and Europeans signed a treaty agreeing to agree. We had already determined that we weren’t going to all the busy holiday spots, so decided to go south, where we haven’t visited much. Now, believe it or not, us old fuddy-duddies decided to invest in a GPS. Really! There is way too much to see here, and our time too short to waste it being lost. Armed with that, we headed south to see something a little different than the beaches and bush we’ve been doing around here. What beautiful country that is! Once you leave Auckland, no more highways, just two lane roads. The little rounded hills are beautiful.

We can’t wait to see them in the springtime. They’re a little brown now, but still beautiful. One of the cool things they do here is plant hedgerows in their fields. Sometimes to separate their pastures, or to separate property lines, or to keep the cattle out of the fields, or just as a wind or erosion break. They’re so pretty! If you look real hard or enlarge the picture you can see them.

The countryside was so beautiful, and we went through area of corn fields and lots of dairy cows. Very rural and very pretty! We wound up in the little town of Matamata, which probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but just outside of town on a sheep farm is where some of the movie "Lord of the Rings" was shot. We took the tour and loved it! There is almost none of the set left, but learning the story behind the year of absolute secrecy there while the set was being built and the movie shot was great. There are several “story boards” placed around that have pictures of how it looked when the movie was being filmed. The whole location is very secluded and very pretty. It was chosen based on this humongous tree beside the pond. For those of you who are Lord of the Ring fans, maybe you will remember some of these places.

The Party Tree

The pond beside the Party Tree

A little of both

This is the picture board of what the area looked like with the set built...

... this is the same place now.

The little valley where it's located

This is the story board picture of the Party Tree and the Party Field, the actual set during the filming of the movie...

...and this is what it looks like now.

Put Hobbit Dad in the picture.

Nestled in the little round hills around the Party Field are the Hobbit holes. Originally there were about thirty eight I think, but after the filming was complete they started to dismantle the set and some were torn down. But someone saw a profit it leaving the rest and giving tours of the location, so the ones left are really all that you can see of the original set. They don't have the pretty little gardens or fences or chimneys like they did in the movie, but you can still imagine what they were like. Notice the sheep now grazing all over the hills.

None of the filming of the inside of the Hobbit holes was actually done there. They were just facades, and the inside shots were done in a studio. However, one was built big enough for people to actually stand in it because some filming of the Party Field was done from the hole. Dad took this shot from inside that hole across to the Party Tree and Party Field. It was a really fun tour.

(just so you know we were really there)

Before taking us back to town, they took us to a real sheep shed and showed us how they shear sheep.

They said the world record for shearing is 800 plus sheep in 9 hours. Whew! After that they brought out four little lambs and gave some of us bottles to feed them.

I was so tickled at this little guy who squirmed and guzzled and wagged and flipped around his tail till I thought he was either going to shake himself apart or beat himself to death. What a fun couple hours that was!

Then we drove on to Hamilton, taking dozens more pictures along the way. It was all just so beautiful! We went to the Hamilton Botanical Gardens and enjoyed that. Here are some of the things we saw there:

A cool, refreshing sight on a hot summer day

There were several ethnic gardens. This India one was so brilliant with color!

How do you like the size of those pumpkins? Dozens of them this size in good old fashioned raised garden beds. There were actually a couple dozen raised beds with great looking stuff!

We went back to the Indian restraunt we ate at a couple weeks ago in Hamilton and loved it again. Then on the way home that evening we stopped in a little town called Pokeno where they have great ice cream at a little tiny roadside place. A triple scoop for $2.80, which is only about $1.50 US. Not bad. It’s rapidly becoming our favourite stop on the way home :o). We got home exhausted after a wonderful day of touring.

The next morning we were up and at it again. This time we drove to Hamilton to the temple and spent a couple hours there. The grounds are so beautiful.

From there we proceeded south and took in more beautiful countryside. In spite of my researching, somehow it escaped me that the north island has mountains! Hills, yeah, but not mountains! Wrong. We stopped at a famous cave and went through the museum, but opted not to do one of their tours. These caves have “glowworms”. In the museum we learned that the “worms” are nothing more than snotty strings that are spun by a cave-dwelling larva to attract their prey. The strings they spin really do glow in the caves as they hang down. It looked like it would be very pretty, but not at their price. So we’ll just say we were there. We left from there, headed for the west coast, which we haven’t explored before. But the adventure was the trip.

Oh my gosh, it was a windy, narrow, steep mountain road – for about three hours. We twisted and turned so much I spun for the next three days! We finally got to the bay, only to discover it was about 6 pm and the only way we were going to get home that night was go back over the mountain to the main north-south highway. Along the way we saw so many great vistas, valleys below us,

a beautiful waterfall, a natural bridge with a stream under it (used to be a cave with a stream, but the roof caved in, leaving just the natural bridge), and a small cave.

We picked blackberries, and had a wonderful time. But by the time we started back over the mountain, we were exhausted, and although it was another road, parallel to the one we had taken to get there, it was equally windy and tedious. Another wonderful day in the beautiful outdoors. The only disappointment was that when we reached Pokeno, the ice cream place was closed up. We had our mouths set for fish and chips and a big tall ice cream cone. Next time!