wanderlust: rugby and rainbows

Oh, the lovely rain! It makes even lovelier rainbows! This weekend we were sad that Ellen had to leave, and excited for rugby and for Monica and Ian!
Josh and I stayed in New Plymouth on Friday night and went to the Puke Ariki museum in the morning. NZ has a lot of cool museums. We were looking mainly at the new exhibit, Don't Mention the War, which was all about the Taranaki land wars in the mid 1800s.

And the wind wand again. I think it's cool.

So after our venture around New Plymouth that morning (and a really great breakfast at a fun colored cafe kitty corner to the museum) we headed north where we were going to meet Moni and Ian. Here's our gorgeous view from our crazy little room/house at Seaview Holiday Park just outside of Mokau....this is my favorite beach. Yum. It might be Josh's favorite beach too.

Who are these cute kids? Nice van!

We headed out to Three Sisters, which is three rock formations in the water...used to be four till erosion took that one, and one of the three is going to be gone soon as well!
Here's something someone carved--looks like Yoda.

So you can see the two big guys, right? The other one is that tiny little rock on the right. Poor forgotten third sister. You can only get to this during low tide, unless you want to go swimming. We were there directly at low tide and I still took off my shoes and socks and had to walk in the water. And then it started raining on us a lot...we all got soaked.

And on the way out of the parking lot I saw these calla lilies growing on the side of the road (they are all over the place right now!).

Then we had to leave Moni and Ian and go to the All Blacks vs Ireland rugby game! It's not often that they play in New Plymouth, actually, it's not that often that they play in NZ, really, so it was a really cool experience. Here's Josh with Ann and Jim, Ann is one of the nurses at the clinic, and Jim is her hubby. Aren't they cute? Ann and Jim have their caravan at Belt Road Holiday park, and have an AMAZING view of the water.

At the game! These things were putting out some heat!

I was super excited cause the All Blacks were practicing on the side of the field that would have them performing the haka towards us, but then they got the other side in the toss. Sad.

Josh's camera has a better zoom than mine.

We're so cool!

Here's a scrum. I don't know how there aren't more neck injuries in this game.

Action shot!

And the score board at full time. The poor Irish had a guy who got red carded and was off the field in like the first 10 minutes, so they had to play the whole game one man down.

We got back to the holiday park by about midnight, and went right to sleep. The next day we had planned on doing part of the White Cliffs hike, but turns out that it rained. A bunch.

So instead we went a bit more north to the Kiwi house in Otorohanga and saw the great spotted kiwi, and ate at the yummy Thirsty Weta again. Then we went to the caves to see glow worms! Or maggots, as they are otherwise known.

More rainbows on the way. We saw like 5 of them that day.

Cool carving at the new Waitomo cave site--the shiny bits that look like rain are actually representing the sticky threads that the worms send down that catch their food. Yum!