Life on the Beach
Not even three days into our stay in Punakaiki and we had to make a town run today. We have a pretty small fridge so we’ve been trying to strategically plan out our meals. But our run wasn’t for food . . . BJ needed a new battery for his computer and we both had to send in our documents to the Chinese Embassy to see if they will let us into their country. Now that I write them down they don’t seem that urgent of items but they were two things that needed to happen. Since we had been to Greymouth on the way into Punakaiki, we drove out the northern road into Westport. A very windy 45 minute drive away, Westport gave us the feeling of a classic New Zealand town. There isn’t much to it, only one strip of road lined with shops, banks, and a grocery store, but everyone we encountered was so friendly, which is quite opposite our experience in Queenstown where customer service just didn’t seem to exist. Two rainbows and distant storms over the ocean led us back to our current home.
Although we’ve been putting in long long days in front of our computers since we arrived, switching positions in the living room from the couch to the comfy chair to the countertop, we’ve been able to escape a few times for sunsets on the beach as well as a very short bike ride up Bullock Canyon. We are going to attempt to “get out” every day around lunch time as we can easily spend the early dark evenings finishing up work for the day. The sun sets at about 5pm every night and we’ve been sticking to our plan to go down to the beach and watch it. Every time we are on the beach we keep noticing the same type of birds fly by (we’ll just call them the long-neck-black-flapper species which has a sister species that BJ and I encountered in Alaska). They, of course, are flying north this time of year and they just keep on coming. Probably one of our favorite things about our new batch is that we can hear the ocean, especially when a big set comes in. It’s a constant reminder, in addition to our amazing view, that we live on the ocean. Neither one of us can wait until the weekend when we may have some more time to explore some of the nearby trails in Paparoa National Park, that is if this little rain storm that is pounding us right now lets up.