And today's destination is...

Didn't stay up late last night - just long enough to photograph the moon over the water.  Supposed to be a superduper moon later this week but it's doing OK thus far.

Up early this morning - lovely windless day with the sun dodging behind wispy clouds.  Where to? I asked myself.  First step was to the kitchen - Al had been fishing yesterday and Linda had prepared a couple of nice snapper fillets for me.  What better brekkie than them on the barbecue, accompanied by some earlier-in-the-week rice fried with a couple of eggs.  This deserved not to be rushed so I took my time for a chat with Al about all sorts of stuff and nothing in particular.
All of which did nothing towards deciding where to go and what to do.  Eventually the answer came to me as I was cleaning up - what I really fancied was a swim in the sea, a bake on a towel with a book and a shady tree I could crawl under if I smelt the familiar aroma of burning skin.  So, pausing only to slap on some SPF 30 and grab a chilly bag with book, fruit juice, towel and GoPro knockoff, I headed off down the gravel path to the beach here.  The tide was out so I kept my sneakers on while I swam (I am determined to leave that pair behind as they have seen much better days.)  The beach here is very flat and I was able to go out nearly quarter of a mile - as the tide was coming in, getting back was simply a case of lying on my back and waiting for nature to take over.
Talking of lying on my back, that is the worst position possible to be in if you want to read with the sun just about vertically overhead.  So I spent the next several hours rolling from side to side on my towel and trekking from sun to the shade of a huge pohutukawa (that's it in the middle of the picture).  The tree was hanging rather tenuously from the face of a cliff so I was prepared to bugger off at high speed at the slightest sound of crumbling rock.


But, of course, I must get exercise so I set off for a trek of just over an hour and a half around the rocks.  I poked around under rocks, scrambled over oyster shell covered vertical walls of rock and generally acted like a curious 6 year old.  Reviewing my route from the shade of the pohutukawa later revealed that I must have walked nearly half a kilometer.  I put it down to the length of time it took me to sneak up on a group of cormorants, only to discover that I only had a wide angle lens with me so that, to get a decent shot, I would pretty much have needed to shove my camera up their noses.  That's them on the left, taken from 3 metres away.  David Attenborough, eat yer heart out.

A quiet evening at home was called for after all that exercise but it was vastly improved by Nonie turning up at about 8 p.m..  She had phoned and texted but the one thing I seem amazingly capable of with a cellphone is turning the ringer volume down to zero so I hadn't noticed.  I wish I could figure out how to transfer music from my laptop to my cellphone as the only decent CD I have found in the car so far, a copy of Brothers in Arms that has seen better days, tends to make me feel homesick.

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