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| Monday morning
was a much warmer day and the sun was shining again. In our haste to get
to Napier it turns out that we booked in to the wrong Holiday Park for a
week.
Never mind, it is very clean here but we are near the airport, the railway and the main road, which seems to have heavy traffic on it throughout the night. I hope I will get used to the noise! Today we explored our immediate surroundings and we seem to be about 8km out of Napier. However the terrain is flat so we can cycle everywhere. There are some very nice houses along the beach and we like it a lot but I think to live here would be too noisy in the long run. |
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This afternoon we cycled into Napier and then explored on foot. Fergus needed some bits from the electronics shop and then we visited an Estate agent. He recommended that we looked at houses in Hastings and Waipawa and he had a lovely looking one in Waipawa. Arrangements were made and we will go tomorrow and visit these houses. I am very much looking forward to that. Hastings is close to Napier and Waipawa is only 45 minutes away from Napier so we be out of town but we would have easy access to eventually work in Napier. |
| In the meantime it is Sunday again and we have been on whirlwind tour of seeing estate agents and houses. We saw three houses we liked and I was very much in love with a B&B, in a lovely two story house called "Dippers Hall" It reminded me of something out of Beatrice Potter, or Toad Hall. It was fabulous, and stuffed full of the most expensive antiques. The garden was a fantastic array of roses, secret walkways and hidden pergolas. It was so lovely and I had to admit that once all the furniture had gone it would not be quite so nice and it would cost a fortune to furnish it for a B&B. Fergus thought it was too twee!!! It was also off the main road and we had a feeling that the existing guests came to this place solely for the setting and we could not afford to take it on. |  |
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Somewhere along
our travels we saw a house, out in the countryside, surrounded by rolling
hills and wonderful trees. The area looks like the South of France, very
colourful and the trees are just starting to turn golden yellow.
From this house it is only 15 minutes by car to the sea and 25 minutes into Hastings.. The house sits alone on a gentle hill overlooking this lovely countryside and the land, which reaches right down to the river. The outlook is lovely and it has a great feeling of space and openness. The inside of the house is open plan and the main living room has wooden polished flooring and flows into a very big kitchen. It even has a dishwasher!!! The big windows and double doors let in a lot of light and it feels very spacious. There is decking on three sides of the house and so one can live inside then flowing easily out of the house to the garden. The house has a mortgage on it but the owners seem to have run out of money, before they managed to finish re-building it. All the main work is done to renovate and modernize this great old house (built in the 1900’s) and we need to spend some money on it to finish it off. However the price is good and we will make an offer on Monday. If we get it this house would be a bargain as there is quite a bit of land and we could possible run some livestock on the land! So we are all excited again but this time Fergus is very happy and if we get this house, it would make up totally for the land we did not buy right at the beginning of our trip in Whangarei. If it does not work out, we will carry on travelling. |
| The good thing
is that we are finding out what we like and do not like so much. This is
the very first time that we are buying a house together and it is lovely
to explore different options, with different lifestyles attached. As
winter approaches we would have a base and we could take all our things
out of storage. We could work on the house as well as live in it and then
in the spring when the weather gets warmer again carry on travelling.
We look forward to the coming week and perhaps by then we will have another rainbow to chase…. |
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