Burning Caravans

Up sticks this morning and a long drive to New Plymouth was the plan for the day. First things first coffee, then pack the car, then leave. We headed down to Auckland to visit my cat Chairman and to drop off the fuel tank and various unwanted pieces of baggage. Chairman was asleep as usual but once awake seemed pleased to see me. Apparently he's been well behaved and not left any presents of dead birds in my shoes yet.

Lunch from the Lekk bakery in Bayswater, this is the bakery at the start of my street so I had the prerequisite Steak and mushroom pie which the Blog was named after and also a rather giant cream doughnut

Fresh and stuffed full of cream they don't get much better

On to New Plymouth  with Pete behind the wheel for the first time. Everything was a bit uneventful till 20kms past Piopio where we were stopped by a fairly large fire in a caravan which had then set the surrounding countryside on fire. Lots of smoke, fire appliances, police and water tankers and us stuck for an hour with a fuel tanker behind us before getting turned round and having to do a giant loop detour to get back on the road to our accommodation.

Observations from the road: Clapped out jags seemed to be driven by wankers. Delica 4WD vans travel at excessive speed then stop randomly, then over take you again 15mins later on blind corners.  The February super-moon is tonight and looks pretty big (14% Larger and 30% brighter according to Mentalfloss), apparently March's (21st) will be even bigger.

Mikes brewery was well shut by the time we came past so off to the local pub (the Fitz) for dinner kitchen was closed (9pm) also missed the quiz so no practice for the south sea hotel. We had to settle for MacDs for dinner.