September was a beautiful month and I experienced a lot!
September 1st was a Sunday and we drove to Hamilton. There, we visited the Hamilton Gardens, which were really wonderful; there were different types of gardens, such as English and Japanese.
Afterward, we spent some time in the city and walked along the waterfront.
The following weekend, I needed a rest day on Saturday because the first month had already been quite busy. But on Sunday, we went to Rotorua to visit the Redwood, a giant tree forest. It was truly impressive; these trees were enormous! There is also a treetop walk that we did. Afterwards, we explored Rotorua and visited Lake Rotorua, where we saw black swans just swimming around. :)
On the way back to Tauranga, we made a quick stop at the Omanawa Falls and walked to a viewpoint; you could have also walked down about 300 steps to the waterfall, but since it was getting late and that would have been quite exhausting, we decided against it. ;)
In the week that followed, there was a lot to do at the RDA because the sensory trail (a 'horse playground' that you can walk through during therapy sessions with the horses) was set to reopen, and to make it less rocky, we had to rake a lot of soil over it, which was really hard work.
That week, we also baked pretzel rolls for the first time, which turned out to be not as difficult as I initially thought.
The following weekend, we hiked in the Papamoa Hills for the first time, a regional park not far away, which was lovely because the weather was very nice and many little cute lambs were running around everywhere!
On Monday, we had another normal riding therapy day, and starting from the 17th, we had two weeks of vacation in which I flew to Dunedin on the South Island for a few days. (I wrote about that in the previous report)