We arrived in Auckland Airport at 7:15 am on January 27th, after a flight that began, for us, on January 25th. Josh will have missed all of Super Bowl Sunday -- Cori won't have missed it at all.

We stayed here for a week. We recovered from jet lag pretty quickly, thank goodness (but it's easier going West than it is going East). Chas and Lucy live in a house in a retirement community in Te Kauwhata. They designed and built the house and have a life-lease on the land it's built on. It's a nice one-level house with a deck outside, looking over the fields and hill of the Waikato district, a flat basin of good farmland between mountains and sea, with several lakes. Great farmland, lots of water, many mosquitos...

Tuesday we set off to try to find Hobbiton. Chas and Lucy had given us the Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook which had directions to many of the actual spots used in filming the movies. Hobbiton was filmed on a farm near Matamata, about an hour's drive southeast of Te Kauwhata. We drove down and tried to follow the direction in the book, but they weren't very good. We ended up stopping at a service station where Josh and Chas went and asked about it. The man working there said that the farmer who owns the land was charging $50 a head to go see a bunch of fields with basically nothing there.

So we decided to give it a miss. The area we were driving around in was totally Shire-like anyway, so it didn't seem we'd missed anything. We had a great lunch in Matamata at the Workman's Cafe, a funky little spot with really great frittatas and coffee. There is a sign up in the middle of the town that says "Welcome to Hobbiton" so we got a photo next to that and headed home.

David and Fran Chown, cousins of ours, came to dinner that night as it was Fran's birthday. Lucy made a pav (pavlova), which was spectacularly good, as her pavs are. Great to see them. The big cousins party on Saturday was to be at their house, and it was nice to get to know them before then.

Wednesday we drove up to Auckland and went to the top of One Tree Hill to get a view of the city (it was very windy up there -- and some jerk chainsawed down the 400-year-old tree, so it's gone now, just the monument). And then we went to Kelly Tarleton's Underwater Adventure, an aquarium and penguin-arium on the bay. They have penguins, and a replica of Shackleton's Antarctic hut, as well as a giant underwater tunnel under/through a tank full of sharks, giant rays and barracudas and other fish. It was beautiful, and the penguins were cute. Several were in molt, so had about half their feathers.

Afterwards we went for a walk in Parnell, a trendyish area with lots of boutiques and restaurants. It was late for lunch, but we found a nice Italian place back in a courtyard and settled in. The sun was in and out, but mostly out, and it was still windy. But it was a glorious 70 degrees.

Light dinner that night (sausages!) and early bed.

Thursday morning Josh and I went for a walk around Lake Hakanoa, in Huntly, about 20 minutes away. I had my first sunburn, so I was covered up as well as possible. The air in NZ is so clear and unpolluted, and the population so pale and British, that they give UV info with the weather, as in "Today's burn time is 12 minutes." Ignore it and you'll be sorry -- promise.

The walk around the lake was a nice flat gravelled footpath (3.62 K) that went through some swampy bush and past great little hills. Every kilometer or so there were little piers out onto the lake for better views and/or duck feeding. One pier was being circled by swallows while we stood there, so we got out of bombing range pretty quickly.

In the afternoon we drove to Miranda Hot Springs, which is on the coast, across the bay from the Coromandel Peninsula. The Kiwi kids are all back in school after the summer holidays, and it was a weekday, so we had the enormous pool basically to ourselves. It's a thermally heated pool out in the open, and it felt very nice to soak away the New York winter, even though I did get more burned (despite sunblock!). We've adopted the custom of morning and afternoon tea, and my caffeine intake has soared. No doubt my weight will follow. But it sure is a nice relaxed thing to do.

Friday Chas and Lucy drove us up to Auckland on Friday where we spent the day with Anne (Douglas), another cousin. We drove up to Mount Eden, then walked around Ponsonby and shopped and lunched and shopped some more. We met a friend of Anne's who makes really great T-shirts, and had to buy one. It says "Aotearoa" in this great Brooklyn Dodgers font.

Later we had drinks and Thai food dinner with Anne, her husband Ron, Anne's brother Hugh (another cousin) and his girlfriend, Madeline, who were all great fun. It was good to meet cousins in batches, so we weren't overwhelmed at the big party.

We stayed at Anne's place in Grey Lynn Friday night and she and Ron drove us back down to Te Kauwhata to Fran and David's for the big party on Saturday.

The Big Party was lots of fun, a nice low-stress pot-luck. We sat on the deck under a tarp and drank beer and ate and swapped jokes. The complete list of cousins there was: Chowns - David and Fran, Robyn, Gary and Sandy and her daughter Brooke and their son Eric, Kevin and his son Jonathan. Chowns.2 (aka, my generation) - Phillip and his wife Lisa and their sons Caleb and Nathan. Douglases: Anne and Ron, Hugh and Madeline, Helen and Rob and their son Sam, who's 13th birthday it was, and daughter Rose. Comforts: Alison, Lucy and Chas.

Many missing people from my generation, alas, included Jake and Ezra and their partners, busy in Taranaki and the Coromandel, and Lynette and her husband Peter, who live in the UK, and who are expecting their first child in July.

There was much discussion about the next cousins reunion (the last one was in Bali), which will include "the kids" aka my generation. The proposed site was Crete, but Alison suggested we think about Vietnam for a cheap spot. I'd rather go to Crete, as I've always wanted to visit Greece in general and Crete in particular, but it will be on the expensive side. Also, as '05 is Chas & Lucy's 60th wedding anniversary, it may be put off to '06. More info to come when Robyn and Alison have put some thought into it.

Left Josh alone with the cousins to go change clothes and get more sunblock, but he survived and came through with several new jokes to tell me. All in all a fantastic party, and very nice to see Alison, who had arrived from Toronto that morning.

Sunday morning, Alison drove us up to Auckland to pick up our rental car and see us off to Rotorua.