After a bit of a full on week, we all woke up on Good Friday feeling fairly tired and run down and a little bit lazy, so we took it easy for the day with a little bit of egg painting, a little bit of cake baking, a little bit of blackberry picking and such like.
But by Saturday we were raring to go again. So, on a bit of a whim, we decided to throw the camping gear into the car and head out to Kaitoke Regional Park, a beautiful patch of Greater Wellington famous for being the location of "Rivendell" in the Lord of the Rings movies.
It's mostly dense forest and walking tracks, but there are a few clearings in the forest where you're able to camp.
It's certainly not a destination for those aiming for a "glamping"* trip, or even a superior "Top Ten" type holiday park. There are flush toilets and a few electric barbeques dotted around, but that's all. And that's the beauty of it. Being Easter weekend, there were plenty of other people around, but you still get that amazing feeling of being away from the city and just out in the bush by yourselves.
There's a little river behind the camping area - actually, it's possibly usually a decent sized river, but we are officially in a drought zone here at the moment as we haven't had much rain this summer so right now there's not much of a river at all - and there's also a waterhole for swimming, so we whiled away most of Saturday afternoon there...
The forest too, provided much entertainment for the kids, mainly in the form of foraging around looking for evidence of fairies (Molly) and foraging around looking for evidence of bugs and collecting empty cicada shells (Alfie). Cicada shells have always freaked me out, from the moment I first saw hundreds of them years ago in Australia clinging motionless to a load of gum tree trunks. Nothing's changed - I still find them freaky, but Alfie clearly doesn't share my phobia.
Apart from that, Alfie biked his way around and around the clearing where we camped, pretty much from dawn 'til dusk - and then he met a little buddy and the two of them switched between kicking a rugby ball around and biking. Needless to say, he was pretty worn out by nightfall and it was surprisingly easy to get him off to sleep!
On Easter Day we woke to rain. (Bad timing!!) The farmers of the area must have been jumping up and down with excitement, but it didn't make the Easter Bunny's job very easy! The kids weren't going to be deterred though, and I had the task of trying to get the rain coats over their heads while they were running around the tent with their Easter basket collecting eggs!
After several hours of rain which involved a mixture of sitting inside the tent playing Uno and chasing the kids around outside in the rain, the tent was starting to become quite wet and grassy inside, and had sprouted a couple of leaks. We'd enjoyed our time at Kaitoke so much that it made it a very difficult and sad decision, but we decided to return to Wellington for a warm, dry and cosy night's sleep in our beds. We will be back though - we'll just make sure we check the weather forecast next time!
* Glamping is defined by Wikipedia as glamorous camping, a growing global phenomenon that combines camping with the luxury and amenities of a home or hotel.
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