PERFECT DAY

Today we went into town to see a film.

Whangarei does not have much to offer cinema-wise. There is one multi-plex that shows kids films, action shoot'em ups, chick flicks and all the other shit that Holywood spews out. Occasionally there is a good one but it is never on long. Today we had bugger all choice - Cars II, Transformers, a couple of other dire offerings and Bridesmaids. We chose Bridesmaids fully expecting it to be crap.

While it wasn't great it did have some very funny scenes so we enjoyed it.
Afterwards we went to the waterfront. This is an under-used resource of Whangarei that could rival Auckland's viaduct area if there was a greater population here. It is named The Basin. There is a nice promenade around the yachts moored in a gentle river harbour. Nice.

We went to the fudge shop and bought fudge ice-creams. The fudge shop should be famous in New Zealand, I have truly found no better elsewhere. As well as selling many varieties of fudge obviously, they have all sorts of other confection. When it comes to ice-cream there is a great choice of frozen yoghurts and ice-creams of many flavours but our choice is the 'make-your-own'. This is where they use a vanilla ice cream base and add fudge of your choice (it varies but there are usually about ten or 12 choices). They put a couple of scoops of ice cream into a blending machine and add the crumbled fudge of your choice. The mixture comes out like a dense snow-freeze into a cone. Yummy.

 I had caramel fudge today. The Old Girl had vanilla fudge. Now vanilla fudge in vanilla ice cream might sound a bit bland but, believe me, it was sensational. There was a concentrated hit of vanilla flavour in the creamy ice cream base. Great.
We sat on a park bench over-looking the water. The winter sunshine reminded us of pleasant times in Christchurch where the winters whilst cold often had nice sunny, windless days that were a pleasure to be out and about in. we used to go to the Christchurch Art Centre (the old university) some Sundays, enjoy a film or the market and just wander about. Today was like that.