Discovering my Grandmother's roots

Well I am now staying with my Uncle and Aunt in New Plymouth, NZ in their lovely house by the beach. Today we decided to go and see if we could find the farm where my Grandmother (who i never knew) grew up. So we set out from the house with my cousin as our driver and my Aunt as tour guide to see what we could see. We drove through the beautiful country side until we found an old Lighthouse for us to go and look at. It was originally moved from Wellington where it was causing ships to crash and then put up in 1881 in Cape Egmont and has remained in operation since. One reason this lighthouse was particularly interesting to me was because one of my ancestors had at some stage been the lighthouse keeper there. From there we drove on and found the road on which the farm my Grandmother grew up on was, but upon driving down the road we realised that the actual house was no longer there and the whole area had changed unfortunately so my Aunt didn't recognise it as she had not been there for about 25 years. That was a bit of a let down but ok, because I at lest got to see the area in which she grew up. We then traveled a bit further along to the next little town where we visited my mum's cousin Elva who was able to answer a few of our questions about what has happened down the road we were on and what happened to the farm. We stayed for a bit of a chat and a drink before heading off again to the next little coastal town of Openaki. At Openaki we stopped at a nice little cafe for lunch and ended up bumping into Elva again who had come to town for a lunch meeting. From there we headed up to a nice look out over the bay at Openaki where they have a nice little surf beach in the cove. We then started to head back and popped in at the big oil refinery they have out that way and went to the information visitors centre they have set up there and gave ourselves a bit of a tour it is a pretty neat set up with the oil rig about 33km off shore and pipes bringing the oil back straight to the refinery on the land. We then continued home and took a bit of a detour down a beautiful coastal road right along side the water and we came across the local Boat club where someone had built a full size replica of the lighthouse we were at earlier and had put the original light from the other in there on display. From there we headed off and took another detour and this one went past a house owned by one of my mother's other cousins and it is where Tom Cruise had stayed for 6 months while filming "The Last Samurai". We went on further to our real detour destination where we climbed up Maori Pa ( A former Maori fortified village). They built these on little hills formed by the volcanoes in the area and they were fortified by several stone walls and wooden fences as well as trenches around the edge of it. this site is now protected as there are very few of these remaining and it was quiet interesting to see as we climbed up there were a lot of large holes in the ground that were dug out into small caves and these were used for storing supplies and then at the very top there was some remains of where they would have had a small fire place inside their shelters. From there we drove back home after what was all in all a really good day site seeing and learning about my family on my Mothers side.