...And the sound of Te Awamutu had a truly sacred ring

 - and that ring was not one we had to keep secret or safe. Te Awamutu is the hometown of the Finn brothers, the only musicians I had associated with New Zealand. Now, of course, I know Kiri Te Kanawa is Maori, and everyone knows Lorde is from a suburb of Auckland, but when we were planning this trip, it was really all about Crowded House.

Crowded House's first single, Mean to Me, features the line about Te Awamutu, and listening to the song in New Jersey I had no idea what Te Awamutu was - I thought it was gibberish.

Tom surprised me today with a pilgrimage to Te Awamutu. We first stopped by the museum in town:

There were stations where the kids could do rubbings of Maori patterns.

Yes, this is a real record player, playing a Crowded House album!

The museum was funny. It seemed to be part Finn brothers museum, part kids museum, and part Maori history museum. We enjoyed all the parts.

The Finn brothers also collaborated in The Split Enz - a band I hadn't really ever heard of....

s

The kids museum part was very fun

Aidan really loved the turntable

After the museum, we had a very nice picnic at the base of a mountain

And we started the hike up to the top after lunch.

Yes, the trees look like they came straight from the Jurassic period.

Here are Aidan and Jasper for scale

We climbed about 400 steps to reach the top

These are the last 26

Views from the top

Our view from home is pretty nice, too.

Northlands - Day 5: Farm animals, world-famous Maunganui fish and chips, and yes, more beaches

Hi again! I do think we are getting close to caught up. I can't remember whether we had written about Aidan and Jasper's favorite hotel stay. We stayed in a little cottage in Kerikeri, called Avalon. My first impression was quite skeptical, as the property is filled with cottages with names like "Air," "Water," and "Earth." It's also sharing space with a holistic midwifery practice and is proudly flying prayer flags over the deck. However, after being introduced to the animals, I was quickly converted.

Aidan and Jasper went together to the paddock to feed our meal scraps to the pigs and goats. Even the chickens knew to come round the house begging for food, which was quite entertaining.

Yummy food for farm animals!!

Papa pig (Boris) and Mama pig (super preggers - we can't recall her name, but she was so pregnant with piglets that ner belly grazed the ground where she walked)

Feeding time!

Yes, it's a baby pig, named Babe. He was the runt of the last bunch, and is about 6 months old. Super cute - he sneaks out of the paddock regularly. Here he is enjoying the driveway outside our cottage.

We traveled to a town named Maunganui, in search of its world famous fish and chips restaurant on the water. It was a pretty picturesque town on the water and we enjoyed exploring.

Maunganui

We all got pretty excited when we learned that there might be a chance sighting of penguins crossing the road(!) (Really??)

World famous fish and chips! We are all starving. Perhaps that's why it tasted so good...

Hiking around -- who knows what we'll find -- the views are pretty awesome.

Actually, we were aiming for a couple beaches, and we found them. They were pretty remote, which was perfect. It was pretty cold - not really beach weather, but it was sunny and so beautiful - we all enjoyed just hanging out and watching the waves....

... I should say that a few of us were not satisfied just watching the waves. They had to really get in it. I think the temperature was somewhere around 65 degrees. I think they may have been inspired by having this amazing place all to themselves.

We warmed up by building a city in the sand.Yes, I am sunburned - I didn't know it then..

Yes, those are extra fortifications.

More exploring our private remote beach

We know you were wondering what the town's name is

Babe was quick to greet us when we returned. He missed us all day!!

Aidan's post

Hi, Aidan here. Hope you like my first post! :) 

On the weekend after week one of this school term Mom and I decided to go biking around the lake near our house. We saw many cool sights but as you can see below, our favorite ones were the goslings- I mean cygnets. We knew they were baby swans, or cygnets, but both of us kept forgetting and calling them goslings by accident. I had loads of fun but I could have asked for more photos to blog about. I hope you like it!

Me, in an unusually still action shot-it is much easier to see me. 

I climbed this tree, sort of.

Here are some black swans with their g-cy-g-cy-g-cy-their babies. (most of these photos are Mommy's)

Here are the parseltongue speaking swans...(look below)

...in action!They had cute cygnets. (Finally I remembered it)

We were trying to make it to Two mile bay, we made it to Secombe Park-near three mile bay. These bays are named according to how far they are from our town, even though they don't use miles to measure distance in New Zealand. Also, for what ever reason, they put 3 1/2 mile bay on there.

 We over achieved, not really paying attention to signs. On the way back, there would have been a lot of hills, so to avoid any steep incline we took to the long way, right past our old house!  I had a great time and I worked up an appetite, so did Jasper.