Rain, more rain and pouring rain … all day. We decide to take the opportunity to do some shopping – shorts for Andy, replacement sandals and underwear for me. But despite our rain capes we still get wet. What a dreary day! We have discovered that Billy Connolly is on tour in New Zealand and is playing in Rotorua tomorrow. So we make our way to Energy Events Centre to find out whether there are any tickets to be had. A long shot, but still worth a try. Apparently the show has been booked out for weeks, but by an unbelievable stroke of luck there may be some promotional tickets released for sale today; we need to try the box office which is in another building. According to the Box Office the show is booked out, but mention of the possible release of some promo tickets and it turns out that there are eight tickets available. We get two seats three rows from the front in the centre! How lucky are we! And only NZ$199 (£66). A bargain.
While it continues to rain cats and dogs we spend the afternoon catching up on the blog. We have had to re-house hattie on blog.com as the server problem is proving intractable and we don’t know when, or if, hattieontour.eu will be up and running again. Fortunately most of our pictures and all the posts are backed up – so it could have been a lot worse.
The camp site is sodden and our little tent is standing on a small patch of slightly higher dry ground just on the edge of a very large puddle. The paths are turning into temporary streams and the rain clouds are so low over the lake that visibility is down to a few yards. On the bright side it is warm and we have set up our laptops on a picnic bench under the canopy outside the kitchen. From this vantage point we can watch the rain clouds lifting from the surface of the lake, only to return again a little later. Oh the fickleness of the New Zealand weather!