Wade harvests his own food and gets a cowboy hat

Early morning after the bar. The some of the girls and I decided to go on this cannoing trip called Te Waka this morning. The girls, as they have become regulars are Sarah and Alex(g) (the g is for girl. there is a girl alex, boy alex and my alex...so i'll use g, b, and m to distinguish if in same situation). There were a few others, I think their names are Bambi and Laruen(?) totally wrong on those I'm sure...anyway...
So Te Waka was this trip where we went out on this large cannoe with an outrigger on the water in the Bay of Islands with this big Maori guy named Nick. I got front and was then the pace setter. Was pretty easy paddling with 6. We headed out to this one set of rocks where Sarah and I jumped out with a bucket, swam through the cold water over to them, and hand picked mussles off of the rocks. Kinda hard hanging there with the waves just pushing you around. Fell off a couple times and had a few small cuts, nothing that really mattered. From there we took our harvests over to a small perfect tiny beach. Nick set up a stove and started to cook them up for us while we set off exploring, sitting, and taking pictures. Pretty cool bunch. We had mussles on the half shell compliments of Nick. Very good. Little longer and we packed up and went to other islands. Nick sang a little bit, a few cool Maori songs. Also did a little info/cultural/personal stories about the area. Eg. there are 144 islands in that area, Russell was the first place where Europeans settled (russell was the town across the bay that has the oldest pub, post, bar, hotel, etc. in all of NZ) also used to be a hell hole full of prostitution etc. as that's where sailors went after long voyages. Apparently Nick and his cousin/brothers used to also take these wakas (cannoes) out when they were kids and do the trip we were doing. Fun. Moving along. We did a couple small walks on islands to really cool lookoutpoints with pictures, of course.
When we got back, most of the girls were hungry. I ate the lunch i prepared and headed with them to the cafe next to our hostel. THIS was the perfect end to this day. As we sat there in the semi-shade, there were 3-4 guys with guitars just sitting there having there own little jam session playing songs. They started to play a few others and got some of the local girls they knew to sing the songs instead of themselves. There were two girls that sang, the second had an AMAZING VOICE. the frist girl did give an amazing rendition of sweet home alabama, to give her some credit. It was just nice having some relax time with good music.
The bus left at 3 to go back to Auckland. Seemed like a much longer ride with only one stop. Dan the driver decided to put on a movie at one point and apparently there was a documentary about John Paul II in the player so he put that on for an inordinately long time (long enough for the "seriously?!" to wear off and to get settled into it) then he put on disc 2 of finding nemo which is useless, took that out and put on some NZ movie, the plot being about some stunt driver. Midly eneteraining movie, just annoying because the movie would skip about 10-20 mins occasionally with no filling in of the gaps. This often followed the sequence of drama leading to stunt, prep for stunt........gap.......person dead or disfigured at end of stunt. Fun!
Back in Auckland we check into the Base hostel again. Alex(b) and I grabbed a room together and met Team Canada (married couple named Melissa and Brandan) downstairs, grabbed some food and headed to the bar next to Base (there's always one attached). There was to be $1000 free tab for as long as it lasted...it was gone before we got there. So we had two beers there and decided to make this night a bar hoping night. We headed down to the harbor to some random Irish pub that had a live band on. Good music. I love the fact that Oz and NZ are stuck in the 80's and 90's. It guarantees good music or music you haven't heard in a while but enjoy. I will walk 500 miles is always on everywhere, also recently heard Brimful of Asha again...forgot that song. Anywho...2 beers there, Melissa spotted her roomie from back in College in Canada there with another girl celebrating other girl's b-day. Lemme underline that for you. She spotted a girl she knew really well and hadn't seen in YEARS halfway around the world. (singing) it's a small world afterall!
They join our escapade and we proceed to many more bars. One I got told to leave because I had on sandals, but they didn't really enforce it so we just finished our 1 beer and left. We tried to go next door but that was a fancier place that required collars...who wants to go there anyway?! Then we found the gold mine. Some random bar that had cowboy hats! Yeah, they had hats they were just letting people wear in the bar. We grabbed them, fitted them, grabbed a beer and chilled. That was until 1) Melissa thought it was a good idea to have Jager bombs and 2) there were random girls who were kissing us. Um, it's a shameful story that will be revealed on a nagged basis. There are pics, but they will not be posted. We did manage, however, to steal the cowboy hats with the cunning use of Melissa's jacket! so we wore them the rest of the night
More bars, interesting rejections, a fun walk home with me impersonating Alex(b) and other's English accents badly.