Girls and Guys weekend

This weekend was another long-weekend for us with the Waitangi Day public holiday on Friday. This time we headed off to Kaimai-Mamaku Forest Park, for Peter and Ben to go on a special boys-only overnight bushwalk together; and Joanna and I to have a special girls-only overnight camp. So I'll just tell you about what Joanna and I did (Peter will have to do a separate blog about what they did).
We left home early on Friday morning, having breakfast at a cafe/diner in a little town called Morrinsville. We then drove to Dickey Flat campground, a DOC campground with vehicle access (and it's free), where Joanna and I were going to camp for the night. After Peter had helped me set up the tent, we drove Peter and Ben around to the start of the track for their bushwalk. We then went back and finished setting up camp. We then headed of to check out Waihi (the gold-mining town) and Waihi Beach (the holiday town) and find somewhere to have lunch. Waihi Beach is a typical NZ beach town with lots of bachs (holiday shacks) but not much in the way of places to eat or buy food. It also wasn't a good beach day with it being overcast with occasional showers and down on the beach was also pretty windy. So we made our way back to Waihi town and checked out the old pump-station building from the goldmine, the huge goldmine pit and the main street, ending up at the Ti-Tree Cafe for a nice lunch together. It was then back to the campsite to hang around for the rest of the afternoon/evening. Joanna was very well behaved and was happy to play while I cooked dinner and afterwards we went for a walk before bedtime.
The night wasn't so good, as while we had been out for the day, a group of about 12 teenagers had decided to set up camp next to us and proceeded to consume about 3 cartons of various varieties of alcohol between them from about 5pm until 2.30am (the biggest downside to a free campsite is there is no supervision/control of behaviour). This was accompanied with loud talking/laughing, the singing of some silly drunken pub song, and the construction of a fire (although they weren't the only ones to do this - despite about 6 signs around the campground clearly stating 'No fires allowed' - they were just the only ones to think of lighting one at about 2am, when most others were already in bed!). This caused both Joanna and I not to sleep very well - she didn't cry or just stay awake, she was just like I was rolling around a fair bit as the noise disturbed our sleep and kept waking us up.
Anyway, we survived the night and woke up at the reasonable hour of 6.30am. The morning was spent having breakfast and trying to find stuff in nice morning light to take photos of, before it was time to start walking up the track that Peter and Ben were on to meet them on their way back. They were running a bit later than we had discussed, which meant that instead of a total of a 1hr bushwalk carrying joanna (30min in, meet up, 30min back) it was closer to 2hrs. So my shoulders were a bit tired (I'd hate to have not been doing any weights at the gym!). Today was a stinking hot, clear, sunny day, so we were all ready for a nice sit down meal with a cool drink, so it was back into Waihi town and we discovered the Chambers wine bar + restaurant which had a $10 lunch menu. We then had to go back to the campsite and pack up all our gear, before driving home. We are all pretty tired (some due to physical exertion, some due to disturbed sleep), but really enjoyed our trip and are considering doing the 1-night camping thing again.