Christmas Eve Shift

Life's a Beach!

Christmas eve shift is traditionally very busy, with lots of drunk people to arrest down in the heart of Union Street.

This year has been slightly different! I was crewed with Scottish Jimmy and we were the only two working at Mangere station. It was lovely weather, so we decided to go for a drive around the coast. We had a few pictures around Howick beach and then decided to head back to the station. There were no jobs for us to do, so we shut the station three hours early! Not quite the same as Plymouth!

Pukekohe Swimming club Christmas club night

Charlie in the lead on the backstroke



On Sunday 16th December we went to Charlie's swimming club Christmas party. Charlie competed in four races and won three races and came third in the fourth race.


Charlie at the finish line after the freestyle race

Charlie got PB's in all four races and was rewarded with winners ribbons. The races were followed by a barbeque and cakes.

Charlie with his winners rbbons

Putting up the Christmas tree and Decorations

Yesterday we put up our Christmas tree and decorations. It was a totally bizarre feeling to be decorating the tree in temperatures near 28 degrees celsius!

We have put two mini trees outside, but we can't put the lights on until about 2130 hrs, when it gets dark!

We are planning on having a barbeque on Christmas day. It is just too hot for a traditional roast dinner.

I have managed to get a couple of weeks off work over Christmas and the new year, so we are planning to head north with the camping gear. There is a Police association campsite at a place called Stanmore Bay, about three hours drive north. We can get a good rate and the site is right next to the beach.

All of our photographs are now on http://www.flickr.com/ if you fancy logging on and looking at them. We will still be updating our blog regularly.

Graham's Beach

Graham's Beach

Last weekend we went exploring along the cost and found Graham's beach. It is about a forty minute drive from our house and is a really quiet little beach ( We had the beach to ourselves!) There are barbeques set up and the sea is really traquil. It was really nice to just relax on the beach with no-one else about.

A Day At Pukekohe Raceway

On Sunday we spent the day at the Pukekohe raceway. It cost us $40 to get in (£15) for a full day of racing. There was a variety of cars, with Super mini's, Formula first, Porche's, Super saloons, super sedan's and Muscle cars.

Lunchtime entertainment!

The track is about a fifteen minute walk from our house. There is also a drag racing track near us. We will be visiting there soon.

One of the Nitro funny cars


Charlie with his new car!

Our First Barbeque

The BBQ gets its first Kiwi outing


On Saturday 1st December we had our first Kiwi barbeque. The weather is starting to get really good now and it is usually around 25 degrees Celsius during the day. It just feels so weird to be sat in shorts and T-shirts in December!

Hayley with her Veggie nosh

Lord Muck!

A nice cold beer to wsh down the burgers

A Trip To Karioitahi Beach

On the cliffs above the beach

Last week we went exploring on the West coast. We visited a beach called Karioitahi and it is about 25Km from our house. the west coast is characterised by big surf and rugged coastline. The beaches are also black sand as opposed to the East coast, where the sea is a lot more tranquil and the coastline more gentle.

Charlie Starts School

First day as a Kiwi school kid!

Charlie has joined Hill School. It is about a thirty second walk for Charlie to get to school! He is really enjoying it and his new teacher is called Mr D. and he is South African. Most of the kids go to school bare footed and they are not allowed to wear shoes once they are in the school! It seems that they spend most of the school day playing sports! I wish i had been a kiwi kid!

A Walk in the Hunua Range

A Waterfall in the Hunua range

We live about a twenty minute drive away from the Hunua range. This is a mountain range on the East coast which is covered in forest. It is full of walking tracks and mountain bike tracks, so we ventured there on our first weekend off to see what we could find.

The area is very pretty and very remote. We found loads of cool campsites and tracks to go mountain biking.

Overlooking a reservoir

Say Cheese!

A nice spot for lunch

Our Furniture Arrives!!!

Our Furniture arrives after seven months in storage!

After a week at the holiday home, our furniture eventually arrived. We did quite well as there were no items missing and only our coffee table had a small chip on the corner of the glass. MAFF came and examined all our outdoor kit and after getting the all clear from them it was a case of emptying over 160 boxes!

It was great to have all our belongings again and it felt like christmas opening all the boxes. At last we could make the house feel like a home.

The Lounge starts to take shape

Charlie working hard!

The Garage starts to fill up!

Finished at College

The last two weeks at college went pretty quickly and it was a case of just getting my head down and studying for the big final exam. It all went well and i passed without any drama's. I also qualified with a gold card for the annual fitness test.

The fitness test over here is a bit like an army assault course with loads of obstacles such as climbing through windows, Dragging a body, doing a tyre carry, climbing walls and fences and a run. It was good fun really and if you beat your target time by more than 30 seconds you get a gold card pass as you are considered as highly fit! My target time was 2:36 minutes. I managed to get round in 1:59 minutes, which was the 2nd best time in the group. Not bad for an old git!

The last night at the college was really nice as we had a formal dinner. The quality of the food was first class and we were treated really well. I left the college on the Thursday afternoon and drove up through the heart of the North Island to Taupo. I had a hotel booked for the night and i started to get a bit worried when i heard on the radio on the drive up that there was twenty centimetres of snow forecast on the road over the mountains at Tongariro national park!

I was glad i had the four wheel drive, as the snow was laying thickly on the road over the mountains. I got to Taupo after a five hour drive and when i booked in, the receptionist informed me that i had been lucky to get through as the mountain road had just been closed due to the snow! Taupo seemed like a very beautiful place and certainly somewhere we will be visiting in the future.

A view over Taupo

I headed up to Pukekohe on the Friday to pick up the keys to our new house. I had a week on my own before Hayley and Charlie would arrive on 26th October. Things did not start well when i found out our Furniture container had been moved onto another ship and was now nearly two weeks behind schedule. It was now going to land in Tauranga and get railed up to Auckland. This would mean that i was in the house for a week with no furniture at all! I picked up the keys to the house and headed up to find out what it looked like now that it was all finished. Unfortunately the house was not quite finished and i found that none of the locks worked, there were no blinds anywhere and the fence had been smashed over by a lorry delivering soil to our as yet unlandscaped garden. Great!

After a few choice words to the estate agent the blinds and locks were sorted and the garden was booked to be completed during the next week. I also managed to book us all into a holiday cottage (or bach as they are known here) in Clarks beach. This is a really quiet holiday village about half an hour from Pukekohe.

At 5:45am on 26th October i was sat in the arrivals terminal, waiting for Hayley and Charlie to arrive. We had been apart for twelve weeks, so it was great to be back together again. We spent the week chilling out and letting Hayley and Charlie recover from their jet lag. They also had the pleasure of being sat next to a screaming baby all the way from Los Angeles for twelve hours and thus getting no sleep!