Picking Blueberries

Finally our family (oh excluding our dad!) went on a road trip of sorts! My brothers, my mum and I went down to Ngatea (south of Auckland) with a few church family friends to go blueberry picking today! Originally we had planned to go last Saturday, but it was Chinese New Year Festival so we decided to reschedule it to today.

We all met up outside McDonald's in Greenlane to figure out what route we'd take and who would be following who. It was agreed that the Minister's family would follow Nadine, and Jessica's mum's car would follow Aonghas and us.

The drive down to the blueberry farm took just over an hour. We just saw grass, hills and cows for most of the time so there wasn't much to look at. I tried entertaining myself with the music on my iPod and teaching Hamish how to use the SLR.

There were a few occasions when Aonghas's phone GPS went a little funny. There were a couple of times when the GPS said we were travelling in the water!

We eventually reached the blueberry farm. We grabbed some bags and buckets and went to start picking! We were looking for blueberries on the nearby trees when one of the farm staff told us we were picking from the wrong trees and that we had to go to the far side to find the blueberries!

There were rows and rows of small trees with blueberries on them. We were trying to pick the largest, least-wrinkliest and darkest blueberries! Hamish started to fill his bucket with blueberries our mum wasn't too happy with, so he was just told to find blueberries to eat! We could eat any blueberries we picked, but we had to pay for any blueberries we decided to leave with.

I was trying to pick the best blueberries, much better than Jireh and Tommy's 'high quality' blueberries! After a few hours though I got a bit tired of picking. Joylynn started chucking blueberries at me so I retaliated. It ended up becoming a full-on blueberry fight! Lucky we didn't get caught by anyone!

We eventually got tired of picking blueberries and tried jumping over this huge ditch while the parents carried on picking. We all seemed to successfully jump over the ditch but then Hamish had a go and...landed in it! Fortunately the muddy water was quite shallow so he didn't get too dirty!

We soon decided to head back to the office to pay for our blueberries. I think our mum ended up paying for $40 worth of blueberries! We hung around eating lunch by our cars before deciding to return to Auckland. Before we could go anywhere though we were held up by all these cows crossing the road! They seemed to know where they were going though which was quite impressive!

The drive back to Auckland was a little more tiring, and Aonghas was trying to stay awake and alert so I played some music on my iPod for him. The only thing was I was starting to fall asleep too!

We got back to the McDonald's Greenlane carpark where our parents discussed what we were going to do next. They all soon agreed to go have dinner together at a nearby restaurant called the Golden Horse. Some others from church such as Derek and his mum, Tim and Gabrielle were going to join us.

We sat upstairs, with the younger people sitting at one table while the older people/parents sat at the other table. I don't know who ordered the food as it was done while I was in the toilet, but there was quite a lot of food!

I was full by the end of it, and so we were all talking. I tried asking Tim to tell me the story about how he and Gabrielle's relationship started, and in the end everyone made him tell the story in front of them all! It was quite amusing but very sweet!

After Gabrielle and Tim shared their story about how their relationship started, the minister and his wife shared their story as well. It was really nice! Hopefully I'll have a story like that to tell one day!

By then it was getting quite late, so we all headed off home. It was just as well, as tomorrow is my first day at work!