On Holiday with Laptops

There are two reasons for going on holiday. One is to visit new places, take part in new activities and do all sorts of fun stuff that you wouldn't do at home. The other is to do all the relaxing that you don't have time to do at home. Technically, you could take a holiday at home and do that, but you would see all sorts of things calling at you, like the garden that needs weeding, so it's more relaxing to go somewhere else.

I suspect most people fall on a line somewhere between the two extremes - for me, I'm a little closer to the "doing new things" end of the continuum than the rest of my family. Or at least, so I believe.

I don't own a laptop - my computer is a desktop Mac computer which I like very much. I'm quite happy to leave it home when I go on holiday. Picture this - four people in a hotel room (timeshare, actually), three of them absorbed by the contents of their laptop computers, and me with a book. Only I finished the book, eventually, and anyway, I'm not used to having time to read a whole book uninterrupted, and I get restless.

So here's what I did on everyone else's "rest day"

I went for a walk up the hill through beautiful native bush






The view from the top, firstly towards the small town of Russell across the bay ( you can see the ferry heading from Russell towards Paihia)



and secondly towards Waitangi, where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 (Most of the buildings are in fact the Copthorne Hotel, the treaty grounds are behind that)



and later in the day, after school was out, I went over the road and indulged my curiosity about the sculpture in the school grounds









The sculpture by Martha Meyer and the children of Paihia School was inspired by a long list of artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Antonio Gaudi and Friedrich Hundertwasser. Hundertwasser is the artist responsible for New Zealand's most photographed public toilet which is in Kawakawa, a small town near Paihia where we stayed.

And here it is: