Our family's life in New Zealand
For our family’s Christmas celebration, we took a picnic lunch and ate it beside the Haupiri River. Then, we went back down the road a couple of miles to the boat ramp into Lake Haupiri. The boys launched their barrel boat and spent the afternoon boating around the lake and playing in the water. I enjoyed sitting in a camping chair in the shade and looking at the scenery! The second picture shows Gloriavale, directly across the lake.
Mr. Intellectual continues to work on his strip canoe. He finally got all the strips glued together, and has been working on sanding it. It’s beautiful! Here it is nearly finished, and then with the last strip in place and part of the sanding done.
Meanwhile, the boys have been enjoying their barrel boat. Here it is after the first use, when they went down the Grey River.
This was the day they used it next, when we went down to the creek below our town with some friends to spend a Sunday afternoon in the water. They punted up and down the creek a number of times, but then that got boring, so they decided to sink it. The only way they could get it to sink was to take the plug out of the end and let it fill up with water—and even that took a long time!
Then, they used it on Christmas Day on a lake—I’ll publish a post in a few weeks about that. The most recent time they used it, Simon took Esther and one of her friends, and our two little boys, down the Grey River. They sunk it, and now they have to rebuild the motor—or dry it out, or something. It ended up quite dented, as you can see in this photo that Mr. Intellectual took to show someone.
