30 December 2018 - Parua Bay, Whangarei Harbour, Northland

We moved back out on to our section yesterday and were set up within a couple of hours; awning out, electric cords laid out in readiness for the generator, et cetera. We even erected our brand new gazebo on a flattish mown spot behind the motorhome, although my ever practical husband insisted it come down again before nightfall; who knew what winds could stir in the night. This was very disappointing because I had visions of a semi-permanent shelter from the sun, an ever ready outdoor lounge. Still the regular erection and dissembling will offer some form of exercise. Speaking of which, as I write this, Chris is outside with his newly serviced weed-whacker trimming the tall dandelions that grow on the clay bank directly beneath our steps.

This morning I enjoyed the rosellas and tuis, and late yesterday while sipping my glass of wine in the gazebo, a pair of wood pigeons across my view of the bay and far below,  paddle boarders and sailors bobbled about the calm waters.

My father expired mid-morning on Sunday 16^th December, my mother, younger sister and I at the side of his bed, generously provided by the local Hospice. Outside the sun shone on the pohutukawas in full bloom along the riverside, pennants waving in the gentle breeze from the mast tops in the marina and within the first floor, his life finally fading before  us. A chaos of emotions had raged inside me over the preceding weeks, most to do with the resentment of having to do so much all so foreign to my experience, and yet when the time came, I was so very glad to have been there through it all.

We buried him four days later after hasty but super-efficient funeral arrangements were made by email and telephone, a task made more complicated by the fact the plot awaiting his body, and that of my mother when her time comes, is in Pio Pio over 350 kilometres to the south. Fortunately my brother-in-law was willing to carry out Dad’s wish and take the casket down in the back of his car; fortunate too is it that modern SUVs are getting bigger each year. 

Less fortunate was the panic when we discovered the plot was officially not in the Bevege name and that the title had never been formally changed when my third cousins gifted it to my parents. It was by mere chance I recalled a visit I made some years ago to one of their progeny and still had the telephone number in my phone, and they in turn were able to advise contact details of a sibling who “might” recall the transaction. It was fortunate too that the funeral directors, and apparently the County Council, were willing to accept an email from this distant cousin recounting the gift enough to cover their backs against future eventualities. 

So finally everything came together and as I stood on the hillside above the Mokau River, here not much more than a creek, I recalled standing beside my father early this year on this very site, murmuring my appreciation of the view he would have when his ghost rose up early in the morning, the best time for an old shepherd to be out and about. Poignantly a bugler played the last post from higher on the hill, on a World War I bugle my father found in a second hand shop in London thirty years or so ago, and gave to the said bugler on the condition he play it at his funeral. Alas the piper had already passed, so there had been no processional  lament as grandchildren carried his coffin up from the hearse.

Christmas came and went with little to mark it but a few hours spent at my mother’s late in the afternoon cooking dinner for her and my very supportive husband, and now just two weeks after his passing, my mother must learn that life can be lonely and unfair, but she was lucky to have the years she did with my father, almost sixty seven of them and all of which she recalls in a positive manner. How many can say that?

We spent seven and a half weeks at the Whangarei Central Holiday Park, and the Park was almost full when we pulled out yesterday morning. It had served us well, as had those who work away meeting the needs of the travelling public, the berry farm workers backpacking their way around this beautiful country of ours and the semi-permanent caravan dwellers of which we were two for longer than expected. (More correctly it was my husband and the motorhome who remained at the Park while I spent most of my days and nights in the apartment beside the river, popping back to have the occasional dinner with my husband when the carers came to support my mother)

Our own travelling and tikki-touring about will recommence as soon as my sister returns from her boating holiday and returns to work, thus available to pop in to check on our recently widowed mother, a task that remains for now our own. But our spells away will be shorter or at least within a day or two’s drive from Whangarei.  

Tomorrow will see the last of 2018; who knows what 2019 will bring? Hopefully we can start making plans; there are challenges ahead and alas, few of them of the travel variety. But then perhaps this blog will become more of a diary than a travel account. May the New Year bring us all (you included) good health and contentment with our lot.