We had a pretty lazy weekend for a change.  The boys finished school for half term holidays and had a sleep over at church on Friday night, so our weekend started gently.

A new McDonalds opened up last week in Palmy, so we popped over to check it out and have one of their new Angus burgers, they it was ok, but not a patch on Burger King.  I much prefer Burger King.

On Saturday, we went grocery shopping and just lazed about the house a bit, I cooked a few meals.  We had Mexican for tea, I made Quesadilla and Tacos – yummy.  Lewis stayed at his friends house.

On Sunday, it was daylight savings and we forgot!  We decided on a lie in, thinking that we’d get up about 11, but it was actually 12!  What a waste of a day.  I’ did a lot of cooking on Saturday, which was lucky otherwise the kids and husband would be starving this week.

In the afternoon, the boys went to church for tea as they do every Sunday and we went for a drive up to Te Apiti wind farm (there are some amazing pics on their website).  Chris had seen a map in his 4×4 touristy book that said there was a 4×4 track from Te Apiti back to Ashhurst or Pahiatua, but forgot to take the book!

We drove over towards Woodville and then turned off to go up the Tararua Ranges.  I used to love the windmills, I think they look like soldiers marching across the hillside, that was until we got up close with them.  I had to get out of the car about 4k in, to open a farm gate and there was a huge windmill, right above my head, it makes on hell of a racket, swoosh, swoosh, but not in a nice way, in fact, it sounded quiet menacing!   I kept hearing the War of the Worlds Theme tune in my head and now, I really don’t like the windmills.  Far from being soldiers, they were much more like aliens … “the chances of anything coming from Mars ….”

Click on the pic to see map of the road we drove on and some of the windmills.  A few more kilometres in and there was a sign saying that the road had no exit, so we decided to turn around.  The road was pretty windy and Chris was driving quite fast, I spent most of the return journey feeling quite sick and was very pleased once we got home and stopped moving!

And where does the snow come into this?  You may well ask!  We had some incredibly  unseasonal weather this last week, the weather was the lowest ever recorded fro September, so low in fact that we had snow and as this is very rare, we wanted to take a look and the only snow left was up Te Apiti.  Chris had fun driving Emma through the snow and covering the running boards with snow.  I was very surprised how deep it was, 18 inches in some places.  Chris (and his new found meteorology  knowledge) said the freak weather was something to do with the Manawatu Gorge acting like a funnel and cooling the air down.  You’ll have to ask him if you want more info!