Wellington is on the southern tip of the north island (the ferry leaves from Wellington to go to the south island). We live in a valley north of Wellington, about 20 minutes away. Yesterday, we drove north (for the first time). We actually live about 5 minutes away from the coast, which has beaches and cliffs. The area north of us is called the Kapiti (pronounced CAP-it-tee) and it is nicknamed the “sunshine coast”. Lots of people in Wellington have beach houses (a beach house is called a “bach” — short for bachelor pad I suppose) on the Kapiti coast, and some people even live there and commute into Wellington (there is a train and a motorway).
Kapiti also is famous for cheese and ice cream. So we stopped at several cheese shops, a cheese factory, and a chocolate factory where they were making chocolate eggs for Easter. We also stopped at the ice cream place (where they make Kapiti ice cream), which has really good ice cream with unusual flavors. I had a double scoop: Cardamom / Orange, and Lemongrass / Ginger. Yum yum yum.
We stopped at several beaches, and collected a bunch of “cat eyes”, which are shells that have been worn down so they look like flat white pebbles but with a spiral design in them from the spiral shell. Really beautiful.
On the way back, rather than go back along the coast, we headed inland over a mountain with a great view of the coast. Then we stopped at a park which is kept as a working farm. We got there just in time to see a really good sheep dog rounding up the sheep. They sorted the rams from the ewes. Then we got to see some “sheep dagging” where they shave the discolored wool from the rear end of the sheep, to keep it from lowering the quality of the wool when they shear them. They are going to shear the sheep in a few days, so we will probably go back later this week to see that (the farm is only about a 20 minute drive from where we live). It is interesting how the farm is set up. The buildings are the original farm buildings, but they built a raised walkway over the sheep pens and the shearing area (inside the barn) so visitors (like us) can look down and see what they are doing, without getting in the way. So you get a close-up view of everything.
