Day 315: Bay of Islands to Auckland — Sheep World!! — Pullman Auckland — Dinner at Ortolana
It was sad to pull away from the Vineyard Cottage at Paroa Bay this morning! What a great spot.
We also loved this home scent from Ashley & Co., a NZ-based soap/fragrance company we’ve seen everywhere since we’ve gotten here. Got some for Lobsy and had it sent to her house in DC.
We had a four-hour drive ahead of us to Auckland, which we broke up with a few different stops.
First stop was in a small town called Whangarei so we could grab lunch at Mokaba Cafe, which had come recommended. We used the timing and the break to video chat with aunt Claire, Harlow and the Voorhees cousins, who were enjoying their Friday night in DC.
I also spotted a cool wool scarf — black, tan and coral colors — and bought it. As I was paying, I noticed the tag said it was 40% possum fur. Ok!
We drove another 1.5 hours, listening to the past few days NYT Daily podcasts. If you haven’t heard this one, which features a mature and precocious third-grader named Leo interviewing reporters about the impeachment inquiry, you should. Very entertaining.
Kids listened to their audio books.
Around 2 pm we arrived at Sheep World!! Sheep World is a farm (or “station,” as they call farms in New Zealand) that’s open to tourists. They teach visitors about the business of tending sheep and harvesting wool.
We took seats in a barn-like “auditorium” and prepared for the 2 pm “show.” Lobsy was skeptical. We were excited, because on stage were three dogs — one chained up and two others just sitting there like good boys.
Farmer John welcomed us and introduced us to the dogs — two border collies named Boy and Mac, and one giant brown goofball dog named Muzz. Muzz is the one who had to be chained up. We learned that Boy and Mac are the “Ferraris,” elegant, smooth, stealthy, smart, quiet and fast. Muzz is the “bulldozer driven by a drunk Irishman,” bumbling, strong, overly excited, not so bright, loud. The border collies gather the sheep in open fields, while Muzz is a barker who can loudly track sheep when they go into the bush.
All of the dogs love their jobs. We saw them round up a herd of sheep and put them in a paddock. We also saw John shear a sheep and give us a lot of information about the physical demands of the job and the reasons for shearing at all. It was somehow more palatable and educational than the shearing we witnessed in Tasmania, which was rough and hard to watch.
The best part was that Muzz stayed on stage during the shearing and stole the show from John by 1) aggressively licking the sheep’s face while it was being shorn 2) licking and nibbling and “holding” its hooves and 3) actually eating the shorn wool left behind on stage while John wrapped up his talk. Apparently he likes the protein.
It wound up being a real highlight for everyone — even Lobsy!! Funny what makes a good tour experience for our kids: Animal stuff combined with a native English-speaking guide who makes his points quickly and clearly, using demonstrations and stories. They (we) were hanging on his every word.
It wrapped with a chance to feed a baby lamb from a bottle.
After the show we took a little more time to visit the station’s other animals, which included a wheezing miniature pony, shaggy black pig, a mama duck and her babies and more.
We wrapped with a nature walk around the property.
Willa signed the guestbook. She told me she was trying to think of a b-word so she could incorporate some sheep baaaa’ing pun. I suggested this:
Soon we were back on the road, with another hour to go until Auckland. Between bites of ice cream purchased by Lobsy, James told her about the chocolate fountain in Dubai, into which Grammie and Beepaw Jim had let them dip as many marshmallows as they’d wanted. Then James paused before asking: “How come grandparents are always tricking us?” Took us a while to figure out that he actually meant spoiling.
We’re staying at the Pullman Hotel in downtown Auckland.
After getting settled, we wandered into the cool, new waterfront Britomart neighborhood in search of dinner.
We landed at Ortolana (thanks, NYT 36 Hours in Auckland!), and had a really delicious meal.
The kids were excellent. Love their new coloring books. James told us that he was “especially proud of” the very rainbow-y part in the bottom right.
We noticed right away, by the way, that the dinner crowd out and about was more diverse than anything we saw in Sydney. I know Sydney is a diverse place, but it’s maybe not as integrated? We went a whole week, covering a lot of neighborhoods, and basically saw people who looked just like us. Here, we’ve seen a lot of Asians and Indians, not to mention Maori.
MISC:
They call Auckland the “City of Sails” because people here are die-hard sailors and the marina holds sailboats as far as the eye can see.
Someone told us Auckland would be “an ugly Sydney.” I might just revise that to be “a smaller Sydney-like city.” There are only 1 million people in Auckland, and it’s by far the biggest city in the country! But so far it doesn’t come across as ugly at all.
We learned on the walk to dinner that James’s cool-guy alter-ego Johnny now has a girlfriend. Her name is Elizabeth and she has dyed red hair and wears sunglasses all the time, “even inside.”
We listened to another podcast, this time Ezra Klein interviewing Jonathan Haidt, who’s written a lot of great stuff and has some TED Talks I like. His latest book is “The Coddling of the American Mind” (you can read the gist in this Atlantic article). The topic of the interview was why today’s college kids are so fragile and consider words they disagree with to be “violence” against them. He talked about how a combination of social media (eg, the effects of bullying, feeling left out) plus extreme over-protectiveness among today’s parents has created a generation that’s basically…unable to cope. They show up to college unarmed with the skills they need to brush things off. Kids today no longer get pushed out into the street to play unattended between the ages of 7 and 12 — which is exactly when the brain is primed to learn survival/toughness/social coping skills. By the time parents are letting kids out on their own — 13, 14, 15 — it’s too late. My question: How do you let your kids play unattended in NYC without getting arrested?? Ugggh. But duly noted.
It made me think about our year. Our kids have become braver in all aspects but one: Going out on their own. We’ve created an environment this year where they need to be within eyesight/holding our hands a lot of the time (eg, lots of crowded, foreign, chaotic places). So when we get to places where they should go off and explore on their own (eg, a sprawling woodland backyard in Tasmania all to themselves), they’re annoyingly unadventurous unless we join them. We hate it. It’s the opposite of what we thought would happen. Will take some work to undo that unexpected side effect but — especially after listening to that podcast — we will prioritize it.
