And the rain came down ......

We set off for Auckland on a sunny-ish Sunday afternoon, looking forward to time seeing some of the sights of the big city with our good friends, Richard and Vanessa. By the time we'd completed the two and a half hour drive, the clouds had drawn in and by the middle of the night, it was bucketing down.  And now, a week later, it's bucketing down again.

We spent our time in Auckland chatting, drinking coffee in coffee shops in shopping malls, and going on an intrepid adventure on State Highway 1 to the Kauri Museum near Dargaville about two and a half hours north of Auckland.  The rain lifted briefly and we braved it up One Tree Hill to look over a windswept city.  It was so windy, I thought Vanessa might blow away.

Back home in Tauranga we had a brief dry morning and got all the washing dry while keeping an eye on the sky, but since then it's been pretty wet! On the news tonight we heard there had been 225mm in 2 days.  Last night Nic had to go out to a school dance and there was flooding all over the town. Some roads were closed, one of her colleagues had their house flooded up above step level.

The rain is relentless - huge downpours with wind at times and some thunder and lightning  but mostly just sheets and sheets of rain.  It feels like the sort of rain we get at home during a thunderstorm - but here it goes on and on, day after day and it doesn't end and then dry up.

Nic says it often goes on for 2 or 3 days and you just get used to it. When she moved to NZ Ray told her that it rained for 2 weeks and she was really glad that he had remembered wrong!

Emily has been a bit wild and we realised that she was suffering from cabin fever, so Nic dressed her in her "silly Billy's" which are waterproof dungarees and her rain jacket and off she went, crawling across the grass, playing with the ball and the cat. Lovely!

Rain should clear tomorrow and we hope to see some blue sky again.