Up fairly early today and off to the saturday market in Paraparaumu (Paraparam to the locals, Pram to the teenagers!) Beach. Nice little veg market, come bric-a-brac, come car boot, come Women’s Institute come….. well, you get the idea, there was a little bit of everything!!

I would have said everything except alcohol, but we picked up a jar of strawberry jam with brandy after an “”energetic leetle tasting exercise””……. almost had to walk home!

We picked up lovely fruit & veg at some very nice prices. We also got “”encouraged”” into buying a lovelyCastle loaf of bread – the storeholder cheated by wandering through the market with a tray of freshly baked loaves! An awesome smell, and just too scrummy to ignore!

We dumped the shopping in the car, which still had the pine in the boot and was smelling like the outside of a forestry commissioner’s jacket – who needs car perfume sachets when you can have the real thing? As we hadn’t really had the opportunity, we wandered around the “”eclectic”” array of shops in Paraparam, including a craft shop, a couple of clothes shops, a bargain basement store and a fairy shop – even contained a kit to help you catch fairies, as if anyone would want to wrench them from their homes and put them in a box – poor things………..

We tried another cafe on the corner of the main street for something to eat and the obligatory lattes – and another chance to sit and watch the world go by while watching the sea.

We dropped off the fresh goods at the cottage and headed for PaknSave, the local supermarket, which was meant to be cheaper than Woolworths where we had shopped for the day to day necessities. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t brill either, but we had been meaning to do the “”get you sorted in the cottage”” shop for some time and couldn’t really put it off any longer.

Then back to the cottage for a restful afternoon/evening sipping a home-made iced tea for a quick thirst quenching, followed rapidly by lovely Chardonnay we picked up at PaknSave – how very lush and moorish………