Today was the first day of Daylight Savings. It was a *perfect* day and now it really feels like summer is here.

I had to go in and do a couple of hours' work in the afternoon. After that, I didn't have anything in particular planned, but the weather was so great I had to go and do something outside. So I decided to drive randomly until I found something interesting.

I ended up driving all the way over to the North Shore and went down some roads I had never been down before. Eventually I found a cliffside parking area beside the entrance to a bush trail. A sign showed paths going south to Kendall's Bay and east to the Chelsea Sugar Refinery. (Yes, I have been playing Fantasy Quest too much lately.)

It was the most perfect weather for doing something like this. I was the only person on any of the bush trails I took. The air was warm and smelled like trees and flowers (and mud and water and swampy bits, depending on the part of the trail). On the first part of the track, somebody had been felling trees, so there were logs to jump over and walk along the top of, and the whole place smelled of wood shavings.

After spending an entire week in an indoor office job, it felt so good to be out by myself on a bush track on a sunny day, I ended up running the whole way to Kendall's Bay. It was mostly downhill on a twisty little mud track covered in roots and pinecones. Sam, Leen and Dave mentioned the NZ practise of building roads which go around everything instead of through -- the same rule seems to apply to bush tracks, only more so, because the path twists to go around *every single tree or shrub*, no matter how miniscule. I got to Kendall's Bay, stood there panting for a second, then turned around and managed to run about half of the way back up again before my lungs decided high spirits weren't enough for this.

I ended up taking the Chelsea Sugar Refinery track as well, since I had never been there before. This track was nicer, as it went along a clifftop beside the water, which was occasionally visible through the forest. After forty minutes scrabbling up banks and down mudslides, it opened out into an access road to, yes indeed, the Chelsea Sugar Refinery. This is a very large collection of buildings on the water's edge, painted bright pink. If a smaller building such as a house was this colour, it would be ghastly; however, the audacity of painting a HUGE COMPLEX of buildings bright pink overwhelms the viewer so much that it commands a certain admiration.

Since I had no idea where I was by this time, I decided to keep going through the refinery grounds and see what was on the other side. There I found a wooden bridge which led to an incredibly steep concrete path, which eventually brought me out again into suburbia. I then walked around various bits of this area for another hour and a half, heading in the general direction of "back", until I found a road I recognised and got to the car again.

When I got home I spent the rest of the day lying on the back deck reading "Pride and Prejudice" and eating homemade chocolate ice cream. Yay for summer.

Now that I have a job with regular hours again, I am looking forward to doing SO MUCH in my spare time which I haven't been able to do for a long time.