That girl's a genius... I think she's serious

So this weekend was awesome! Started out by taking Friday off and driving up to Kuratay for a long weekend. Sure it was a bit cheeky of me to ask for a day off after working only a few weeks, but I am a traveller, so I think it was alright. The boss didnt seem to mind at all anyway. So we left around 530, 5 ppl crammed into a subaru legacy with heaps of stuff in the trunk. We brought all our tramping gear to do the tongariro crossing, but we knew the weather was going to be awful so we probably wouldnt be able to tramp at all so we had decent clothes to wear as well. We stopped at McD's for dinner and i got a hamburger happy meal... so good. We stopped again along the way for sundaes and then again at a little pub for beers and a quick game of pool for josh and katie. We arrived at the cottage (or bach as it is referred to here) quick late and pretty much went to bed straight away. I got my own room and it was glorious. I slept in until 10am! pretty much unheard of for me. Very exciting. We had some brekky and headed into town around 12 after doing 200 crunches with Katie and 2 minutes of wall sits. we are so hard core.
I decided that I wanted to do a skydive since the weather was too crap to do the crossing, we couldnt even see the mountains because of the fog. But it was still a pretty warm day, and the skydive place had an availability at 12:50, which was pretty much perfect. I jumped with 2 british guys and my instructor was Joel. He was nice but not too excited about the jump, he said he does it 15 times a day and had done it over 5000 times total so it wasn't very fun for him anymore. Little bit of a downer. I put on a red jumpsuit apparatus (haha) that smelled of nervous sweat (not mine... it already smelled before I put it on) and a little leather cap and some gloves. The plane was tiny and took off with us all sitting backwards, such a weird feeling. I had to sit on my instructors lap so he could strap me in properly which was a bit weird, and he also braided my hair so it wouldnt get in his face. also weird. but he made jokes so i wasn't nervous. Until they opened the plane door at 16000-ft and then i got scared. I was second. The first guy was out within a couple of seconds it felt like and all of a sudden we were shuffling to the open door. I leaned back for a photo and then I was falling, no warning at all from the instructor. It was freezing cold at first, I only had a teeshirt and lulus on under my suit. A camera man jumped with us to take photos and video. It was such a long freefall it was insane, just over 60 seconds of freefall until the shoot was pulled. We had a nice chat while he flew us down, it took ages and I started to feel a bit nauseous because the wind was so strong that we had to spin in circles to land in the right place. LOVED IT though. I would much prefer to do it solo next time but the sport course costs 4000$ and i dont have the kind of money right now... I bought the video and the photos of my skydive. Pricey but worth it i think!


The rest of the day we did some shopping and got groceries for dinner. We also stopped at Huka falls for photos, the NZ version of Niagara falls. A lot smaller but quite cool nonetheless.


Katie and I made a chicken and avocado salad with bruschetta. It was really good. Jess arrived that night and we watched some tv and hung out drinking beers until pretty late. The next morning I slept in until 830 but woke up with a massive headache and realized I had not drank any water the day before. I read my book until 1030 and then went out to the kitchen for breakfast. It was raining pretty hard but we went for a walk down to lake Taupo anyway. Its a gorgeous lake, the deepest and largest in New Zealand. apparently its great for deep scuba freshwater dives. All that info courtesy of Josh Chapman Derulo. For the rest of the day we hung out in Taupo, and went to the honey hive where they have a museum about honey and let you try local honey in crazy flavours like lavender, peanut butter and my personal fave ginger which i bought a jar of!


then we went for dinner at Burger Fuel. We did sit down in an Indian Restaurant but left because the prices were higher than listed. lame. i got a vego burger made of chickpeas, seeds and other stuff with avocado, tomato, lettuce and much more. it was a gigantic burger, imagine about 3 times the size of a regular burger. So big you need a cardboard contraption called a doofer (pronounced doofa) to eat it. So good. They had about 10-15 burger choices, 4 of which were vego. I was impressed. And the kumara (sweet potato) fries were outrageously good, as was the garlic aioli. The place reminded me of a fast food version of the works on a smaller scale. And all the burger buns were whole wheat with sesame seeds unless you asked specifically for different which i thought was awesome. That evening we watched The Longest Yard and ate heaps of candy which we purchased from pac n save (the cheap grocery store...like no frills).

The next day we drove back to Upper Hutt around 11am. We stopped in Foxton to try Foxton Fizz, a soft drink made in the town. I had my first Creaming Soda, tasted a lot like Inca cola! Not the nasty 10 yr old flat kind, the carbonated kind. We also stopped at the big gumboot for photos and then again at Wild Bean (an awesome cafe found in BP gas stations) where I had my first taste of Ginger Crunch. Its so good, I actually just made some tonight.

Ginger Crunch Recipe:
Base:
125g Butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
Cream together butter and sugar then add other ingredients. Dough will be crumbly. Grease 9x9inch pan ad press dough into pan. Bake at 180 degress celsius for 20-25 minutes.

Icing:
75g butter
3/4 cup icing sugar
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tbsp golden syrup (or honey)

Combine ingredients and ice base once cooled.
Share with me.


After that we stopped on the kapiti coast for kapiti ice cream (used to be made there, but the factory had to be moved somewhere with more space) and a cheese tasting. I tried brie, blue and an old cheddar. All amazing. I got a scoop of delish passionfruit and lemon curd ice cream. So creamy. I bought some blue cheese too. I learned you do not shorten the word passionfruit by saying pash because that means to "make out" here in NZ. oops!
We made it home around 430 and did our grocery shopping before heading to Hannah and Jamie's for a pot luck supper with Katie's other sister Rebecca and her fiance Reg as well. We watched Sherlock Holmes (decent movie) and had roast chicken, beef stir fry, garlic bread, corn and roast potatoes, with cookies and cream ice cream and vanilla cake for dessert. Awesome.
Back to work this morning and back to the gym straight after since this weekend was all about food...
LOVE!