One of the many tasks we’ve been putting off for ages has been the need to pop over to Kawau to pick up all our stuff we’d left there. When we sold our Kawau house, we sold it fully furnished, but we still managed to fill an entire garage over there with personal effects and other stuff that didn’t sell with the house.

So after a blustery week of rain and wind, we hired a truck, trailer, and barge, and departed from Sandspit for Kawau early on Friday morning. Fortunately the weather was on our side, and a brilliant sunny day emerged to compliment a lovely calm sea.

It was a lovely trip across Kawau Bay to the island, and a nice trip down memory lane as we sailed into Schoolhouse Bay. We said hello to Norm and Jenny who live next to the wharf, and drove the truck up to the garage where luckily one of the many loose keys I’d brought along for the ride happened to fit the lock to the garage (not bad considering 18 months had passed since we last used the key).

We opened the garage with some apprehension – we couldn’t quite remember what we’d left behind, and we didn’t know if the effort involved in recovering our island bounty would actually be worth it. Fortunately the trip was worth it – all those long forgotten ‘treasures’ now recovered and loaded into the truck ready for the trip back to Waiwera.

View from Schoolhouse Bay, Kawau Island

The trip to Kawau was lovely, but it brought with it some closure and recognition that we had moved on to newer pastures (all 13 acres of newer bush clad pasture on Great Barrier Island). We have some excellent memories of great times spent on Kawau Island, and collecting our things from the island helped to provide ’souveniers’ that would help to cement those memories in our ageing, aluminium pot soaked brains.  

The trip home (fully loaded)

Once back at Waiwera, the unloading began, and boxes were opened to check contents ready for repacking for the ‘Barrier’. It was like Christmas at our house – goodies everywhere including spare pairs of underwear and slippers! Peter discovered yet more model boats to add to his museum that we are shortly going to build on the Barrier, and I found yet another Kenwood mixer to add to my collection (I now have 3 mixers, 2 blenders, 2 mincers, 6 bowls, a shredder, and a truckload of mixing attachments).

Clearly, despite slowing down and abandoning the ‘rat race’, our obessive compulsive collecting behaviours haven’t ceased, and we both still struggle to part with any of our treasures in case we might need them sometime in the future. We managed to sort through one of the sheds at Waiwera the other day and discovered amoungst other things, 3 forgotten deer heads, boxes and boxes of car models (again for Peter’s museum), and 24 empty antique suitcases.

Someone should notify the men in white coats now. Meanwhile, we’ll continue planning the development of new sheds and garages for Great Barrier so that we have somewhere to store all this cr#p in!