Freedom Camping

It seems like the world would be a better place if everyone could have such a glorious last week of summer...

Looking north from Kiritehere toward Marikopa

We took a road trip up our own coastline - freedom camping.

Kids in front of our tent, waiting for dinner to cook

Highlights...

Boogie boarding,

Sage learning

Eating raw kina from a Maori guy on the beach

Driftwood fires at night.

A beautiful waterfall - Marikopa Falls - with a rainbow that encircles you as you approach.

Oak and Mercy

Playing on the beach.

Mercy

Noah missed it all, as he was in Germany with friends having his own adventures.

Thank you, Familie Schmitt!

He came home to our new manu platform and a daytime job at the YMCA.  School starts next week for him.

We ended the week by going with Mike to a speaking assignment in the Manaia branch, and meeting a small group of happy, solid saints.

I know it looks like our life is a lark, and it mostly is, but writing this update definitely makes our life look more easy and glamorous than it really is.  I could let that stop me from writing, but I decide to continue.  Good times are interspersed and underlined with responsibilities for the upcoming school year, decisions to make, concerns about kids' schooling and physical and spiritual well-being, as well as the many sand fly bites on our ankles.  

Book of the Week:

Interesting, but didn't live up to Ann Patchett's recommendation on NPR, in my opinion.

How to "Pop a Manu" and The Great Divorce

Epic 5-day canoe trip down the Whanganui River 

Traveling companions: Sue and Jamie, their two boys (Cory and Calum), and a friend named Jack.

Whew! Sue and Jamie are fast paddlers

Traveling companions from our family were Mike, our 3 boys, and Mercy.

(Sage and Joy stayed home with Hannah.)  

just missing Oak

Mike sterned my canoe and proved especially good at getting us dumped in the rapids, on the first day in particular.

He learned quickly

Stopping to explore a cave - not the mud cave yet

We paddled 145 kilometers total, which is a lot of paddling, but somehow the boys and Mercy still seemed to spend half their time poppin' manu's...

or jumping off high places in one way or another.

There are 16 different definitions of "manu" in Wikipedia, but none of them is the definition used by teenage boys (and Mercy) in New Zealand.  

planning the manu

on the way to...

a mean splash

A good manu has a certain ker-BOOM sound and a very high splash.  Supposedly, one must break the water with one's heel, then quickly lay back quickly on the water to create a kind of vacuum.  

The manu is the gourmet version of the water bomb and takes practice.

After all that paddling, I came home feeling like this-

wish I looked like this, too

Oak said, "I feel like my shoulders grew two sizes this week!"

Book of the Week:  "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis

Our neighbours told us that they almost got a divorce going over the first rapids on the Whanganui, but that doesn't have anything to do with this book.  It's about the divorce between heaven and hell, joy and misery.

My copy was published in 1946

Here's a picture of the newest edition, with its unfortunate cover art-

I re-read this book every year over Christmas holidays.  It's my all-time favorite book, hands down, despite the unfortunate cover.