New Zealand - Auckland - a long trip in search of sculpture

I can only begin this blog by apologising to Mark.
"I am sorry - if only I'd known, I wouldn't have suggested it. Please forgive me."

So, not for the first time, I fell for the close up pictures on the front of the 'What's On in Auckland' magazine and after reading about Sculptures in the Garden display they had on at the Auckland Botanical Gardens, thought that if nothing else, I'd like to go to this. I like large sculptures and on a sunday they apparently have music in the park, mandolin orchestras and the like. Sounded perfect.
So off we set on Sunday morning. We had to go into the city centre to catch a bus south. The bus was to take an hour but it's ok, it'd be worth it.
So the bus trundled on the south road out of Auckland. I had been hoping for some nice scenery but basically the whole trip was industrial estates and out of town shopping. The bus was a little late and we set off on the 15 minute walk to the gardens. 15 minutes? my backside was it 15 minutes!!! In the heat, up hill, on the never-ending road. Was more like 30 minutes.
So by the time we arrived, tired, hungry and somewhat grumpy, we had been travelling for about 2 hours.
As I looked at the leaflet I'd got at the vistors centre and looked out into the gardens at man playing double-bass while a middle-aged lady, who was good, sang some kind of jazz song, out on the concrete, I realised that perhaps in the description of this place and the event, they had somewhat 'over-egged the pudding'.
The gardens were pretty enough, but we don't really do gardens. In fact that kind of thing bores us senseless and upon discovering the undersized for the number of people, cafe was our only choice of sustenance, we decided our only option was to get around the sculptures as quickly as possible and get heading back. We had of course, also, by this point sussed out that the sculptures were looking like they may also disappoint. They were not on a very grand scale and in the large setting of the gardens, frankly, didn't work well at all.
But we plowed on around, slowly losing the will to live but took the opportunity to try to get some decent photos.
The floating sculptures that I had so been looking forward to, turned out to be pretty but incredibly small. They were what had originally suckered me in. Someone had taken a super-close up of one of them and made it look like they were a couple of feet high, not a couple of inches.

We quickly headed back to the bus. At least the way back was down hill, so a little quicker. In our hunger we bought something from a rather odd bakery place. Mark had some cookie thing and I had a pizza topping which seemed to have been put on a sweet bread - like you get in an iced bun - a mistake, or that's the way they like them - who knows?
Anyhow, we headed back, stopping off at K Road, just to cheer ourselves up a bit. I tried to find some bars, back towards Grafton that I thought I'd seen, which turned out not to be there, which lead to us having to do more walking, by which time, how shall I put it, Mark and I were not best of friends.

Anyhow, lesson learnt. Not the kind of thing to head off to when you don't have a car and aren't sure of the content. And as I pointed out to Mark, it was a sunny day, he wasn't working in London so he should be grateful.. shouldn't he??!!