My first thought for saturated was colors but while we have green all around us here, it does not feel like we are saturated in green; my next thought was food-related but saturation and food often lead to fun-killing conversations…I was going to give ‘saturated’ a miss until I went for a drive yesterday.

Normally when it is stormy and wet, I drive south down SH1 as SH4 through the Paraparas is prone to closure in bad weather. Yesterday morning I was too engrossed in my Audible book (it wasn’t even that good!) and missed the ‘Kune turn-off (no eclairs for smoko). Fortunately by midmorning, the crews were already well into slicing and dicing the trees that had fallen across the road, and clearing away some minor slips.

What got me thinking along saturation lines were a number of uncharacteristic waterfalls torrenting onto the roadside – not something that you would normally see and a sign of how saturated the ground further up must be.

This was the only one that was anywhere that I could safely pull over and take pictures – much of the road is quite narrow with high cliffs on one side and steep drops on the other. Descending into Wanganui and droving along the river, it was easy to tell just how much water must have been dumped into the catchment over the last day or so…