Esplanade Wander

Today I decided would be a lazy day before I have to ramp up the effort for school again. I spent more than the morning (ummm yes until about 3pm) reading the Camino book given to me by a family at the end of last year- "Travels with my donkey: One man and his ass on a pilgrimage to Santiago" by Tim Moore. I had read a library copy before I went on the Camino in 2008- in fact I may have read it before I even decided to go on the Camino... I enjoyed the book back then, but I absolutely loved reading it this time around. With the Camino 'under my belt' I was able to have such a clear picture in my mind of the places the author was going to with his donkey- and he made me laugh so much! And as happens with pilgrims, I was so happy to find he/they 'made it'. (Also, it was intriguing to see how much the pilgrim 'infrastructure' of albergues etc had developed in the few years between our walks.)

After my great lie-in I decided to have a quick walk in the Esplanade, always a place to enjoy the season's flowers. So here are some of the plants in the sunshine:

The Manawatu River is very low at present. We really have had little rain for months. Even when we were all moaning about our windy, grey spring, we really lacked rainfall. 

I checked out the 'butterfly' section of the garden. There were a few monarch butterflies fluttering around- but there were huge numbers of caterpillars competing for the diminishing supply of food on the swan plants. It seemed that many must be nearly big enough to make that transition into the J shape and then a chrysalis quite soon...

A place I don't tend to wander into often is the rose garden- and of course it looked magnificent in there today in the sunshine, with all the roses in full bloom...