The Eleventh Commandment

Thou shalt not share salad dressing between salads. There, I’ve said the unwritten and oft forgotten eleventh commandment. I suspect it was left off when Moses went back up the mountain for the Commandments v2.0. The breach of this fundamental of the faith is why Kristine and I experienced complete salad failure in the Northlands.

We stopped at Whangarei for lunch at the historic Whangarei Quay and browsed the shops beside the harbour. The caesar salad I had for lunch shared the same aolie sauce as Kristine’s W.A.L.T. sandwich! We were ravenous by this time, and ate gladly. After lunch we both were left with the same salty taste in our mouths from the dressing/sauce!

That evening we went to Lips Beef and Reef in Paihia and we both ordered salads; Kristine had a Greek salad and I had a smoked chicken and brie salad. Kristine’s salad was a normal green salad masquerading as a Greek salad by adding black olives and feta overtop. When they wrote the menu for the smoked chicken salad, they had tactfully omitted the word loaf, and it came in slimy unnatural cubes. Again, against all the natural order, our meals shared the same dressing! Oh, how heinous is the heart of a sinful restaurateur.

Happily, the day was not lost because of leafy letdowns. Kristine and I visited the Whangarei Falls and the spectacular Ocean Beach near the towering Whangarei Heads. The sand of Ocean Beach was clean and scorching hot under our bare feet. It was a relief to cool them off in the surf. The one end of the beach is a massive sand dune which we climbed then ran down. I almost tripped and tumbled to the bottom!

We stayed at Cook’s Lookout Hotel in Paihia which had an amazing view of the Bay of Islands right from our bed. The hotel owners were exceptionally kind and left the cover off the pool for us to take a late-night dip in the 29 degree water. We swam under the stars before bed. In the morning, we had breakfast on the deck to enjoy the morning air and the unbeatable view.