A weekend in Hamilton

A few weeks ago, Rich and I ventured north to Hamilton for the wedding of our friends Stu and James. The wedding was at a place called The Living Church (that wasn't really a church)  and it was a lovely day and very relaxed and I even got to wear a hat, because its not ridiculously windy in Hamilton!

We also had time to check out other things in our university city! One of my favourite things to do in Hamilton is visit the gardens, they have a whole lot of themed gardens and its amazing. These first photos are taken in the children's playground, the second photo is a fairy house that you can look into and see a tiny bed, table and chairs and everything else a fairy may need.

The first actual themed garden we visited was the Japanese garden, I think this is one of the original themed gardens - it was already in the gardens when I started university in 1998, so its been there for a while.

One of the gardens that wasn't built when I actually lived in Hamilton is probably my favourite, the Indian fragrance garden - its absolutely beautiful! So many colours!

I also love the Tudor knot garden, I went through a phrase of reading a lot of Tudor and Stewart historical fiction (so many Phillipa Gregory books) so it was nice to see what a knot garden actually looked like in real life!

There's so many other fun garden's I could share, but I think I will leave it there for now so I can show you some other fun Hamilton things.

I really loved this sculpture outside the Waikato Museum - it reminds me of the simple blocks we used to use for counting in Primary School.

Fun fact about Hamilton, Richard O'Brien wrote Rocky Horror Picture show whilst he lived there, so there's a statute of Riff Raff and some instructions how to do the time warp in the city - Rich and I went to the unveiling of the statute MANY years ago and it was pretty amazing.

We also hung out with my brother and had some ridiculous bubble tea at an amazingly cute cafe!

Finally, we got to spend times with our dear friends that just moved back to Hamilton, which was the best! They even let me take selfies with them.

I hope you all are doing well, I shall return soon, I know I say this ALL the time but I really am going to try to get back to blogging more frequently!

Karori Cemetary - Penguin Shipwreck Walk

This is a very photo heavy post my friend, a few weeks ago (well maybe longer than a few weeks...) I met up with some of my sewing blogger friends for a walk in Karori Cemetery. The plan was to do the Penguin Shipwreck Memorial Walk, we did the walk in a round about kind of way, but I'd love to do it again and spend more time (and also perhaps read the information in the brochure to get a better understanding).

Although we did not follow that path of the walk particularly closely, it was nice to spend the morning walking and spending time with friends.

Strawberry picking day trip!

In my most recent post I mentioned that I have been doing a few day trips, in my part of the world its currently summer (although you would be excused for thinking other wise, Wellington weather has been pretty average) and it had been a while since I'd caught up with a group of ladies who were really my first Wellington friends - so we decided to head over to Masterton to visit Jess, go strawberry picking and catch up.

First up was the strawberry picking at a very cute place called the "Wee red barn" - I usually end up doing a lavender picking day trip in the summer, but that didn't happen this year, it was strawberries instead and it was pretty great.

The Wee Red Barn was pretty great, they grew a bunch of different berries at the farm, not just strawberries - but of course we were there to pick the strawberries!

The strawberries were growing under shelters and were growing off the ground, so we didn't have to bend over too much before we picked them - which was a bonus!

I was also really amazed how huge these strawberries were, we were also allowed to eat strawberries as we picked them which was a bonus!

Once we had eaten all the strawberries we could and filled up our cartons of strawberries it was time to leave.

The cartons seriously held A LOT of strawberries, look at this container, I can't imagine even being able to buy strawberries like this back in Wellington (and if you could buy them it would cost about a million dollars).

 We stopped at the store on the way out, there was fresh fruit, jams and a lot of other delicious things for sale. I bought a BIG container of blueberries - we couldn't eat them all so I ended up freezing them - perhaps I can make blueberry muffins?

Also I couldn't resist saying goodbye to these guys on the way out - even if they didn't really their photo taken!

We stopped for lunch at Paper Road Winery, even as a non-drinker I can't resist a lunch at a winery. There's always lovely, relaxing views of the vines!

We finished up our day at the park in Masterton, I had no idea the park in Masterton - there were deer in the park (I did actually know that) and they made the strangest noise (I had no idea deer sounded so weird!). Also much like goats, deer really don't like posing for photos!

I had such a fun time out with these girls - hopefully we are more organised and don't wait so long before catching up again x