All posts filed under: Travel

An unexpected twist to a Valentines Day walk

To celebrate Valentines Day, Mr D & I went for a walk. We got for a lot of walks together, and a walk is a nice way to celebrate what the holiday is supposed to be about, while avoiding all the commercial rubbish and stress. For this time, we picked a favourite walking spot: Otari Wilton’s Bush, but settled on a combination of routes we don’t often take, to give us a full 3 hour walk. Because we were taking paths we don’t usually take, I got slightly confused, and we took a wrong turn, and ended up somewhere quite amazing: amongst the gravestones in an older, quite overgrown portion of Old Karori Cemetery. Old Karori Cemetery is one of the biggest in NZ (over 4o hectares) and I’ve only ever seen the extremely tidy, well kept portions near the entrance, so it took me a moment to realise where we were. It was quite a fascinating place to end up, particularly if you didn’t expect it: an old cemetery, overgrown and looking as if …

“A perfect day for a garden party” The Katherine Mansfield Garden Party at Hamilton Gardens

Published by The Dreamstress

Last weekend I flew up to Hamilton to give a talk on Katherine Mansfield and Garden Party fashions at the Glory Days Salon at the Katherine Mansfield Garden Party at Hamilton Gardens. Hamilton doesn’t have a reputation for being the most interesting city in New Zealand, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m happy to say that I had an absolutely marvellous time, and that everyone I met and interacted with was absolutely delightful. The point of the garden party is to raise money for a new Katherine Mansfield garden at Hamilton Gardens, which will recreate the garden described in Mansfield’s The Garden Party (that’s a link to the story, and if you haven’t read it, do. It’s delicious. The more I read Mansfield the more I love her, and the more I understand why Virginia Woolf said that Mansfield was the only person who ever produced writing that she envied). The Hamilton Gardens are just spectacular. I wish I’d had a week to explore them! And the Garden Party was fabulous. Hamilton Garden’s …

Clamdigging shorts (with asides)

Published by The Dreamstress

In Dunedin just after New Years, my host asked if I would like to go clam-digging. I’ve never been clam-digging before – there are no clams in Hawaii, and (as far as I can tell) very few within a reasonable drive of Wellington. I am extremely enthusiastic both about new experiences and foraging for food (Mr D says “It’s so weird being with you in Hawaii. You just go into the bush and find stuff and eat it), so I was quite excited. Dunedin has clam beaches (clam fields? What do you call an area where one goes to harvest clams? (harvest? catch? what do you call the act of collecting clams?)) a reasonably short drive from the city centre, so we headed out away from the city to find one. We drove out along the coast, around still bays and past rocky islands, by spreading sand beaches, and between cone-shaped volcanic hills. Finally, we came to our chosen bay, with stretches of sand and shallow sea-grass islands revealed by the ebbing tide. Just a …