on the beach

Wellington natives are a little defensive about the weather in their city. It's easy to see why, since the town is known around New Zealand as "Windy Welly" and it lives up to the name. Even the city's official tourism brochure has a page devoted to the weather. Essentially, it says "The wind isn't really so bad. Oh, and we get sun here! As many sunny days as Auckland!" or some fact. What it doesn't mention is that it can be windy and sunny. For most of our time here, the sun has been a tease, mostly. After a week of gray, windy days, the sun would come out and the wind would cease. It felt like summer was coming, but the next day the wind and gray would be back.
Now that summer is here, the pattern hasn't entirely ended, but at least now there are two or three sunny days in between a day or two of crap weather. This gives us an opportunity to go to one of Wellington's beaches.
There aren't any huge, sweeping beaches around Wellington; most of the coastline is rocky cliffs. But there are a few natural sand beaches. There's also this one, Oriental Bay. It's the most popular city beach, since it's right off of downtown. It's not natural, though. The sand is shipped in from somewhere - I think Australia.
I'll tell you what, though. On a sunny day in January or February, it hardly matters if the sand is real. I'm just happy being on a beach at all.