Spent the day with  3 of the 4 children's families at 'Splash Planet', a water feature park with slides, a rotating river, bumper boats, and a kind of jungle jim above 3 feet of water for toddlers. It's really hard to damage themselves falling onto 3 feet of water. Started off overcast as you can see, but later it turned into a scorcher!

Michael, I left Hastings at 7:30 this morning and had a nice three hour trip back home. It was overcast, but acceptably cool at that time, unlike yesterday when is was unacceptably hot. We now have a builder on our case, and hopefully we should be living in Hastings in a few month's time.

The sea at Westshore this morning was as flat as a flounder's rear end, and there were several people fishing, collecting shellfish of just walking the beach. There must be worse ways of passing a Saturday morning. Taupo was the same, with many people enjoying a swim. Again the water was flat calm, which is rather unusual for the great lake.

I will quite probably get into trouble for this, but as you hit the lakeside approaches to Taupo, there is a very nice lakeside lay-by that is home to a very clean public loo. As you drive out of the car park there is a very flash mobile cafe called 'The Steaming Bean'. This must be one of the few vegetable patches where a steaming bean can be found adjacent to a steaming pee.

Hazel said:

It looks very inviting, Michael – don't show Graham though !  

No, don't Michael. I have had enough of this UK freezer box.

Sadly, Doreen, the 'P' with two e's is a common complaint for men of my age. This comes about by lying flat on the floor for too long and being unable to go: it's commonly spoken of as having a prostrate problem.

Michael, I hope to be in Hastings within six months, we are building an apartment on the rear of our daughter's house. For obvious reasons I can't tell you the address on here, my wife finds little humour with Graffiti on her letter box, junk mail even more so. The apartment will be very near the race course.