This weekend we made a quick trip to Kaikoura. We hadn’t been back there for church since we moved here, almost a year and a half ago. Most of us went to visit our friends there a year ago, and we’ve seen some of the people since then, but there is one dear lady we hadn’t seen at all. It was so good to be there and touch base again with the people we spent eight years with!
On our way, we stopped for a little while in Waiau, and the children enjoyed playing at the playground in the warm sunshine. Mr. Imagination got hit in the face with a piece of playground equipment (a brother got a little careless in bouncing it) and apparently had a slight concussion; the next half hour of his trip was miserable. After he had a short nap, he was fine.
Our next stop was the cemetery in Cheviot where Seth is buried. We had bought a headstone for him six months ago, and hadn’t seen it yet. That was rather an emotional part of the day.
We next moved on to St. Anne’s Lagoon, just south of Cheviot, where we had a picnic lunch. The lagoon was gorgeous on this clear fall day–look at those reflections! It was so nice to see the lagoon full of water again. A couple of years ago, during the three-year drought that Cheviot endured, the lagoon dried up.
After lunch, we headed on to Kaikoura, where we had a joyous reunion with old friends. There were still a few hours of daylight, so we went out to the Peninsula. Most of both families walked partway around at sea level, then climbed a stairway to the top and came back to the car park. The mother and I, and some of the children, walked out on the rocks a little way, then went back to their house and started preparing food. It is so amazing to see what low tide looks like now–so different from before the November 2016 earthquake, when the sea floor rose two meters.
