Our accommodation spot in Raglan, a coastal town on the Western side of NZ's North Island, warrants it's own blog post :)
Unique Sleep
When we were researching a place to stay in Raglan, we wanted to make sure it was extra special, as our dates overlapped with Sadie's 8th birthday. Picking a unique spot that our birthday girl would love was paramount. Solscape hit the mark! It offered a myriad of sleeping options, ranging from earth dome huts to old train cabooses, to various tents. We opted for a "bush belle" tent in the secluded tipi forest (a challenging 15 mins walk from the main accommodation/restaurant area), confident that Sadie would love its quirkiness and coziness. We were right! She was ecstatic. Sleeping in such a unique spot & surroundings made our stay in Raglan so much more memorable and enjoyable.
Sidenote: Paige is getting loads of wear out of her All Blacks t-shirt (a Christmas present). She's full-on Kiwi. I love when she snags my phone and adds her own little text to photos like the one on the right, hehe.
The Conscious Kitchen
Solscape has an on-site restaurant called The Conscious Kitchen. There's a quote posted on their website which pretty much sums up their approach to food: "Nothing with a face or a mother." They're only open on the weekends. Fortunately the tail end of our stay overlapped with their opening hours and we were able to have both Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast there before leaving Raglan.
An impressive pizza oven + epic coastal views + beautiful weather = perfect Kiwi Summer evening. The vibe, fresh food focus and beautiful setting reminded us a lot of the Outstanding In The Field dinners we've been to in Vermont & Cape Cod, MA. The girls chowed on their food and then went back to playing with all the kids they'd met. Felt very much in a happy place.
We enjoyed some Conscious Kitchen vegan fare for breakfast before hitting the road North to Bay of Islands. Fresh faced and healthy, ready to face the day! That view. Wow. Never got old.
Good Peeps
We met a really lovely couple named Nellie & John during our Solscape stay. They were likewise staying in the tipi forest and were having an extended holiday there, with their older teenage kids cycling in & out. We struck up a conversation at the communal kitchen in the tipi forest the first night and immediately hit it off. Easy conversation, free-flowing laughs. Over the course of our three nights stay we would see other multiple times a day, whether it was at yoga classes (held above the kitchen, awesome way to start the day) or the communal kitchen or somewhere in between. No matter the spot, we were always cracking each other up. We had more than a few laughs at hippy dippy Solscape's expense.
One night we were all hanging out and Nellie & John bore witness to hands-down the most random, hodgepodge meal of our Summer. We had accumulated quite a few ready-to-eat dehydrated meals, intending to eat them during our Abel Tasman camping stint. When weather switched our Abel Tasman plans to an AirBnB, the meal packs had still gone uneaten weeks later. We decided to bust them all out and work our way through them as a potluck-type dinner. It was non-stop laughs as we marveled at some of the atrocious meals (many smelling like & presumably tasting like cat food) and the conveyor belt of random foods that kept coming onto the table. It was quite amusing to all six of us!
Surprise Souvenir
Both Nellie & John are teachers in Hamilton, about 30 minutes East of Raglan. Nellie teaches art & photography at an all-girls high school, and John currently teaches Year 4 kiddos (Sadie's age). On our final morning Sadie was showing Nellie some of her drawings (Sadie is aiming to make one topical drawing for each day of our Summer trip). Nellie relayed that she had challenged herself to do regular sketches over the Summer as well! She told us that she was planning on doing a sketch of our random dinner the other night, ha! We said our heartfelt goodbyes to this lovely couple and didn't think anything more of what Nellie had said.
A few days later Nellie messaged us this amazing sketch of hers, depicting that evening. It's amazing!! Her drawing style and attention to detail blew us away. Hands-down this is our favorite keepsake of our travels! It captures a quirky moment in time as a family, and we couldn't be more happy or grateful for it :)
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