Cookies are yum.

There were two regions of mainland New Zealand that we hadn't visited yet. Now there is only one, the Coromandel Peninsula, as we took a little trip around the East Cape last weekend. Well, we started on Thursday and were supposed to return on Monday, but the weather turned to a word I should not use in public, and so we headed back on Sunday already, skipping some excellent walks we had planned. Well, two walks, and maybe we'll get a chance to still do one of them, because it's on the way between Gisborne and Whakatane and definitely not completely out of reach from lovely Maketu. Now it doesn't surprise me anymore to find skateparks in every little pothole, even in the most remote areas of New Zealand, but last weekend, not only did we see the easternmost lighthouse in the world (I'm still not sure if such a thing can actually exist, what with our planet turning out to be round and all, in a surprising twist that I'm sure the president of the Committee for the Terrestrial rim Enlargement Project, C-TrEP, never saw coming), but I also skated, albeit very briefly on account of the structure needing to be swept in a bad way, the easternmost skatepark in the world. If they have a skatepark on the Chatham Islands, it's only the easternmost mainland skatepark. And to stick with superlatives, we saw a very long wharf at Tolaga Bay, which is the longest of it's kind in New Zealand, and maybe the southern hemisphere. The signs and guidebooks don't seem to be 100% sure about that one.

Christina collected heaps of shells for her evergrowing collection and we also saw White Island, and the smoke it emits, from the coast. There are not a lot of people in the East Cape area, but those that do live there all seem to own horses. There was one in the reserve we camped in on Friday night, and a sign telling people not to take horses into the playground in another little town. Actually, it was the town with the skatepark mentioned above. And horses horses everywhere we looked. And someone had recycled their microwave by using it as a mailbox. Also, the peaks of the mountain range on the peninsula had snow on them, while the sun was keeping us nice and warm along the coast.

But the most important thing is that we went and watched the Simpsons movie yesterday, as movies are only $8 on Tuesdays in Te Puke. It was pretty good I thought and everything looked real fancy compared to the TV episodes, eh.