{"id":216892570,"date":"2009-10-31T15:47:54","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T03:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foundbyyou.wordpress.com\/?p=216892570"},"modified":"2010-12-31T11:11:10","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T22:11:10","slug":"a-nice-day-for-a-date","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/?p=216892570","title":{"rendered":"A nice day for a date"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Da

The Bridge Builders<\/p><\/div>\n

Today, our youngest and I decided to grab a little one-on-one time together as we haven’t had a ‘date’ for a long time.\u00a0 Leaving the rest of the family to boring clothes shopping, we headed downtown to see the Da Vinci Machines<\/a> exhibition.\u00a0 While a little smaller and a little more pricey\/commercial than I was expecting, we spent an hour or so wandering round looking at and discussing the themed replica exhibits.\u00a0 These ranged from the well-known like the air screw<\/a>, flying machine<\/a> and tank<\/a> to smaller explorations of engineering principles like the wormscrew<\/a>, column-lifting machine and autolock mechanism.<\/p>\n

We both won a bookmark (a.k.a. exhibition advert) by managing to replicating one of Da Vinci’s arched bridge designs from a pile of notched logs.\u00a0 Da Vinci created these designs for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico ‘Il Moro’ to facilitate rapid troop movements across rivers while carrying out surprise attacks.\u00a0 It took us four attempts to get the structure stable enough to bear our weight and one wonders how easy it would have been to build these bridges without access to both sides of the river or under a hail of arrows or flaming shot!<\/p>\n

A little peckish from our bridge-building efforts, we crossed the street and wandered into the small, friendly and pleasingly un-commercial Auckland City Farmer’s Market<\/a>.\u00a0 There we tried out various things to eat including the delicious pita bread cooked on site by the lovely folk at Abu-Melamed Bakery, poppy seed and Parmesan bagels from the bubbly peeps at the Bagel Love stall and great spicy hot dogs with smoky capsicum sauce from two ladies at an unnamed stall.\u00a0 Sharing a sunny table, we talked to a nice couple who came from Hawaii and Sydney (long distance love?) and took a photo for them – in return, they gave us both a big juicy strawberry!\u00a0 We shared a fruit smoothie while we walked over to the Maritime Museum where one of us got our face painted before we walked up and down Queen Street looking in bookshops and chatting.\u00a0 An ice cream in the sun topped off our trip and we slowly headed home for a cup of tea with big grins on our faces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, our youngest and I decided to grab a little one-on-one time together as we haven’t had a ‘date’ for a long time.\u00a0 Leaving the rest of the family to boring clothes shopping, we headed downtown to see the Da Vinci Machines exhibition.\u00a0 While a little smaller and a little more pricey\/commercial than I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":249,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259,25],"tags":[11,48,76,21,103,757,144],"class_list":["post-216892570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-friends","category-life","tag-auckland","tag-auckland-city-farmers-market","tag-da-vinci","tag-family","tag-fun","tag-life","tag-machines"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216892570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=216892570"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216892570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216893125,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216892570\/revisions\/216893125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=216892570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=216892570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=216892570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}