Labour Weekend - Whakatane

Labour weekend was a good time to do another little foray to Whakatane and Ohope, theoretically missing the worst of the traffic by leaving earlyish on Friday morning and coming back on Tuesday. However we did stop at the Te Puke Golf Club for a round on the very quiet course where we only saw two other couples. They had just cored the greens so they were a bit slow but otherwise the course was in pretty good condition - much better than when we played on it earlier in the year. They only charged us $20 each because of the coring and we enjoyed the round just wishing that our scores had reflected our play on the fairways rather than the greens. A little light shower came down just before we finished but luckily the umbrellas stopped our bags from getting wet.
The golf stop meant we virtually hit the early rush hour in Whakatane which meant that we stopped briefly in the queue approaching the bridge and crawled for about 100 yards before feeling free again - probably about a 3 minute delay!
We arrived at our section in Whakatane to find 3 vehicles already parked there, a dog and the neighbours washing hanging from our tree but they moved 2 vehicles to let us park on the flattest bit. They had a big family gathering over the weekend and after living in the downstairs flat in their house for over a year they are nearly ready to move upstairs. The other vehicle which belonged to the neighbour over the road stayed there most of the weekend but we never saw them to actually talk to. No worries though as everyone around is very friendly.

Our section's over there!

After settling in we had our usual walk down to the Heads and back through the town in time to be back at the bus to meet our friends, Anne and Dave from Ohope, who also have a motorhome. They have just come back from a long camping holiday in France, needed to meet Debussy and have happy hour before we all headed down to the fairly new Spice Guru Indian Restaurant, just down the road, for dinner. A nice night catching up!