Time slips soothingly away in the hot pools of Te Aroha

Words: Sue Hoffart
NZ House and Garden On Holiday – July 2005

The jukebox is belting out Gerorge Throughgood’s Bad to the Bone as we clutch warped, beer-smudged pool cues and shoot for a spot of time travel in Te Aroha. For two nights we have headed back to the BC era. That’s before children, before firday night ment home-made pizza and a rented movie in front of the fire. Definitely before friends began joking about our 8.30 pm bedtime or threatening to report us to the “nerd police”.

In long-ago child-free days they laughed at another kind of nerdiness: our penchant for escaping our frentic city lives to spend weekends in small towns that no one else thought to visit. We would relish staying in b&b’s, walking for miles, choosing between two coffee shops, gossiping with locals and shooting pool badly in some friendly little pub. These unfasionable jaunts gave us time to catch our breath away from work and deadlines, dinner dates and telephones. Besides, we couldn’t afford tickets to Barbados. Read the rest of this entry »