Crossing to South Island

Our second night's camping was at a lovely site next to a municipal park in Upper Hutt, a short distance to the Interislander ferry where we were due early the next morning. We enjoyed walking round the park in the evening and discovered that our tent was next to the Wellington Fault. There are periodical pieces in the paper warning that Wellington is well overdue for a major earthquake. I slept slightly uneasily that night.
There are some pictures of activities in Blenheim. We spent New Year's Eve there on a pleasant enough camp-site that had a swimming pool and a lovely clear stream. We liked Blenheim with its surrounding vineyards and horticultural enetrprises. The town has single sex schools only which is interesting. The New Zealand Falcon was as close as we got to the species in the museum. I did see a few possible wild ones but did not get the views necessary for positive identification.
The train was running in Blenheim even on New Years Day so we had a pleasant trundle through the water meadows into town and back. There was lots of wild fennel growing.

First set of holiday pics showing our transport: called Daisy. First campsite at Turangi and snow capped Ruapehu whose crater lake did not collapse releasing a deadly lahar down the mountain-side. The first of many natural hazards that we avoided!

We've all been on a Summer Holiday ....

..... and we got home an hour ago!
Camping holidays are good for making you appreciate things that you spend the rest of the year taking for granted:
- a roof that will not let in the rain
- a wall that is designed not to let flood-water in
- places to dry clothes
- electricity to run kettles
- tv and video players
need I go on?
We travelled a long way today, from a place at the south end of Lake Taupo called Okahune all the way back home. The weather was pretty rough, rain that was torrential at times and a gusty wind. That did help to keep Daisy's radiator cool. The boys were ecstatic to get home and puppy dog was pleased to see us back. The cats showed their appreciation in typical feline manner by bringing us a half paralysed rat!

Anyway we have taken about 400 pictures of our voyage and when they have been downloaded, some of the cream of the crop will find their way onto this blog.

In the mean-time you can try to put together the information above into a prediction of how our holiday was.

Documentary evidence

For those who like visual evidence click on the link below to see the Christmas Day swimming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU4hZ561CfE

Christmas Day Part II

We are now at the end of our Christmas day. In keeping with the spirit of reinventing the tradition which we started by opening the presents at Midnight. Our church service was at the Salvation Army, then we went round to Mike and Rissy's for food. And what food! No turkey, brussels, and roast potatoes. But BBQ steak, ham, chicken under a gazebo on the lawn next to a swimming pool where we all had dips at various points during the day.
There was also shooting practice, sunbathing, stories, trampolining and puddings.
Very nice and thanks for the invite.
The evening has followed a more traditional route of wall to wall TV of dubious quality (Brotown, My name is Earl, a UK drama about a woman who has 4 autistic boys, and the history Channel: the worst jobs in the world).
There you go our second Kiwi Christmas.
Suggestions for what Chantelle might be saying by email please.

Christmas Day

We are into Christmas Day here in the Southern Hemisphere. Seasonal greetings to all our readers around the world and hope you have good years in 2007.

We let the boys stay up until midnight last night and they had the countdown going on the computer.
Presents were opened at midnight in a break from tradition and to take the pressure off this morning.

Eric is going to add a few words:eric
"For many years i have been buying toy guns NOT THIS TIME! ......"
Stuart says:
"Mine is dad's old gun. We will be shooting for many years!"
Patrick says:
"Nah"
Chantelle says:
"Happy Christmas to you all"
The rabbits and possums in Church road are trembling.

See y'all and have a good day

Posy

Posy was a joyful bundle of black cat. She spent alot for time either sat on the deck with Zephyr or sat on top of the chicken coup counting the chickens.
She cracked us up when she scaled the great heights of the net curtain on the ranch slider , and gave us a giggle when she hid in the blinds of Mike and Chantelle's bedrooom, then absailed on top of their heads whilst they were asleep.
Best of all is that you always came out of the cat flap when we arrived home ffrom work and school.
Posy was killed on the road on the night of saturday the 9th of December.
We loved Posy.

Skools Out

Well that's it for me! I have sat through 2 prizegivings this week, the seniors on Monday night and then the juniors yesterday. I joined the rest of the staff in farewelling various colleagues who are moving on. I was thanked for being the Year 9 Dean. Today after a lovely lie-in and a mosey round the garden, I wandered into school at midday to tie up some loose ends. I cleared out my office and handed the key to my successor. And that is it until next year. I need a break and to remind myself who my family is.

The boys and Chantelle have to carry on until next week, because for some reason primaries have longer terms than secondaries. I get to have the house to myself, which is blissful especially as Stuart and Patrick are going through a music stage at the moment. Stuart is dithering between guitars and harmonicas. Patrick is showing some promise in the woodwind section and has been practising mary had a little lamb on a very cheapo Wharehouse recorder. Such was his enthusiasm that we splashed out on a $10 upgrade tonight. They go to school at 8am ...

Some pictures above, with more to follow. Firstly Captain Stuart on board the SS Matty. As well as being a pleasure craft, his boat has proved its worth as a work boat when we had to repair the irrigaton system to the veggy garden. Then there is the eating of the first peach from our tree - the one that Margaret and Ian bought us when they were over. It was soft and juicy and divine and we hope to have a bigger crop next year. The boy watching Paddy eat is Reuben and though it does not look like it, he had some peach as well!
The other pics are of the Christmas parade which was held last weekend through town. The boys had helped make the float, but Stuart and Patrick were both ill and could not go on it in the end. Eric was a shepherd with his sheep. The other float is of some pupils from Chantelle's school. Maori women often used to have facial tattoos on the chin like these girls - theirs are not permanent.

England vs NZ

I have not done an update for ages. Lots has been going on, mostly at school, where we have all been busy marking exams, writing reports and then getting ready for next year. All takes a long time, but not the sort of stuff I want to put on this blog really. Tonight is Friday night and the pressure is off me. Prizegiving next week on Tuesday ( and for seniors on Monday night). Then that is it as far as obligatory attendance at school goes until February. I worked out that we get 7 weeks off! It seems like we deserve a long holiday as we have been under a lot of stress this term. I do wonder if this holiday is too long and the others are too short. One day when I am minister of education, I will realise why things rae like this, in the mean-time the future looks good.

Check out the pictures. I wanted to compare our crowded UK life with our spacious existence here. The Google Earth image is taken at the same altitude 280 feet and our property is outline in yellow. Nuff said!

We finally bought 3 more more sheep last week. Beautiful dainty Pitt islands they are. The residents are not being too friendly, but they will accept them eventually I think. We knocked Stony on the neck and had him for tea last Sunday. Decided that we only really need 1 cock and that Stony was a brute and was better off to us as slow cooked tea rather than a vicious rapist!

Other news Northern Force won their first match on Wednesday against the Brazilian team Futbao. We are getting better every week though we have some way to go before we win the cup!

Hopefully the next update will be quicker coming than this one.

Stuart's 10th

It was Stuart's 10th Birthday on the 14th..

He had a really good day and recieved some really cool gifts. Her you can see Stuart with 2 of his best gifts, a watch from Great grandad( thankyou GG), and a hammer from his expansive tool box he got. Now he is busy fixing or in the case of his bike , dismantling things. Infact it's going to take a while to work out what goes where on the bike.
Busy week for all at school, Collage is at the peak with exams and year 12's going off now for study leave.
The primary school still bumbles on towards the summer holidays.
A beehive has been installed up the top of the top paddock, in in the photo you can see 2 aliens inspecting it.( Chantelle in the goldie suit mike P in the other.)

Chicks

Spring has sprung with chicks all over the place. Eric has been rescuing the ones that are too weak to make it on their own. Stony (cokerel son of Rocky) was getting too cocky (!) in the back garden jumping up and attacking us when we came out with food. So he was sent down to his dad's in the coop to get sorted out like some adolescent being sent off to his dad's. That worked pretty well as he was beaten into submission. You could cut the tension with a knife in the coop as they were regularly scrapping, so today we rehoused him in a tractor on the veggy patch, with a wife to keep him company.
One hen with chicks lost a chick on Thursday night and we noticed evidence of a rat or stoat run going through its cage. I set the trap last night and we caught a rat this morning.
We said good bye to Independence the wether sheep last weekend as he went back to Pete and Irene's farm. So now we only have 3 ewes and the grass is romping away. We are still waiting to get hold of a new ewe and ram to get our breeding flock into the shape that we want it.
It was Chantelle's birthday last weekend and we had a pleasant celebration. Chantelle had the day off on Saturday apart from rounding up the sheep (some things just have to get done!). We had a nice meal on Saturday night with bubbly. We were going to go to the beach on Saturday but the weather as not good so we went to Rarawa beach on sunday morning. What a place! It is halfway up to the Cape from here on the East coast. White sand and pretty crowded with 2 other people there apart from us! Chantelle had been camping there with Rissy and the boys in the holidays and our school Year 10's camp there at the end of the year. We had a fish and a swim and Stuart made a hobo stove and cooked bacon, picked a handful of tuatuas, and had an icecream on the way home. Being there reminded me of why we moved here and made me more determined to have more trips like that.
The army came to the boy's school this week and took them on trips round the field in a big lorry. Paddy thought it was cool but eric found it boring. He is getting geared up for leaving primary school and going to the Intermediate next February. Stuart and Eric are going on a one night survival trip at one of the teacher's farms at the end of November. Then they both go on the end of year camp in December. They have certainly had some good experiences at Pamapuria.
I started playing in a football tournament on Wednesday night. Our team is called Northern Force, but I don't think that I will be selected to play for NZ just yet. We are a mixture of school kids and parents playing other teams in a local league. Soccer is not as big as rugby over here, but it gets support especially from mums who don't like the violence and injury associated with rugby. I do not much enjoy watching union, league is better as the pace is a bit faster. Anyway we had two games and lost both. I thoroughly enjoyed it came home knackered but buzzing and wasn't too crippled on Thursday.
Oh yes! we had fireworks last Saturday. It was fun especially when the last one fell over and set fire to the hillside. Chantelle and I have never moved so fast with a bucket of water. Due to increasing problems with youths misusing fireworks it is likely that we will not be able to buy them next year.

What a good dog.

Zeph is amazing. He is so tolerant of the other animals.

When posy came , he let her bite and play with his tail. And now he is such a softy with a couple of new chicks. Mind you I thought he inhaled one the other day when he was licking it.
God bless big , scary looking dogs ,with small brains!

Blog Anniversary

I was looking back to see what we were doing and realised that we are into our second full year of blogging. It feels like a lifetime ago in a parallel universe!
Here was our first post
http://bryans2nz.blogspot.com/2004_10_25_bryans2nz_archive.html

Labour Weekend

Last weekend was "Labour Weekend", the traditional start of Summer, when people start swimming outdoors again, the camping season starts in earnest and everyone gets Monday off work. We all felt at home here cos it was like a British Bank Holiday weekend, blowing a gale, lashing it down and tv pictures of traffic jams as people crawled out of and then back to Auckland. Still no-one could take away the 3 day weekend so we had a chilled out time pottering about, dodging the showers.
We shouldn't really complain about the wind here as it hit 120km/hr down in Welly and people took 9 hours to cross Cook Strait (normally 3 hours) with 5 metre swells.

It was a strong wind which put paid to my ideas of catching our sheep and checking out feet and other bits. We went to see Dee's Pitt Island sheep on the Saturday. They have a farm carved out of the bush up in the hills and the boys like it there, because they have big wooden drums on the lawn that they can play on. We watched some of their sheep being shorn by a professional. I was convinced that whilst hand-shearing is an interesting experience, it is better to do it with an electric hand-piece in a fraction of the time. We didn't get to see our potential new ram Skippy, as he had skipped off into the bush and hadn't been seen for days.

On Sunday we retreated indoors and all the boys helped make a new mail-box to replace our old one that has taken a hammering from someone. We painted it a couple of times and it will go up soon (in the next year hopefully).

Marine aquarium news: total smelly disaster, only the crabs survived a week and the rest had to be siphoned out. Perhaps I should have believed the book that warned about using real weed and sand and recommended scrubbing everything.

Pictures to follow, luckily for you all we cannot upload smells!

Marine aquarium

We have been back at school for a week. All of us apart from Stuart who did 2 days and then came down with a nasty strep throat again - he had to take off Wednesday to Friday. We arrived at this weekend worn out from the unaccustomed early mornings and full on days. This weekend has been time to catch up on sleep and generally chill out.
We had a Fawlty Towers video night with Mike and some of his kids l;ast night. 6 episodes one after the other. Still funny but I couldn't have coped with any more. Basil is such a tragic character. Why does he not save himself a whole load of trouble and tell the truth. Him and Sybil could use some Relate counselling as well, either that or a ME weekend!

Today we heard through the grapevine that there was going to be a 12 hour power cut while some repair work was done. Fortunately I heard early enough to go into school yesterday and do my photocopying. That meant we had the day to play. It has been a bit grizzly, overcast with an unsettling wind and rain not far off. we decided to do something with the large fish tank that has sat gethering dust in the corner of the dining room for a year. This was brought about by Paddy producing some mud crabs that he had been "storing" in a plastic bag since his camping trip .... 11 days ago!
By some miracle of endurance they were all still alive and he had them housed in an ice cream tub. So we trotted off to Henderson Bay and got rocks and various invertebrates from the rock pools. we picked up some sea water at pukenui wharf and put the whole thing together at home. As Eric said it is like having Animal Planet next to your dining table. I will stick up some pics in due course.

Animal news: 2 ewes have been shorn. No 14 took 2 1/4 hours last Sunday. I am getting the sheep back on nuts so that we can get them doing what we need them to instead of chasing them round the paddock over and over again. One of teh barred rocks started sitting on 11 eggs on Tuesday so we put her in an isolation coop today. Eating lots of broad beans and are concerned about the resultant increase in greenhouse gases from Northland. A lot of my seedlings do not like the nutrient poor compost I am growing them in and they aren't too keen on the strong winds that have been drying them out either. In a future time I will build a lean to greenhouse.

Crazy Boy

It has rained a lot today so we have had a domestic day of pottering about, watching vids and getting out for short spells between to showers.
Patrick has been getting pretty obsessed with various computer games "Age of Empires" and "Settlers" which seem to be very complex games that go on for days and involve building civilisations and having battles with other civilisations.

In between doing that, or rather, when he is forced to do something active to stop his legs from turning into withered stumps, he goes hard out. Check out this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzWEmzEmjGQ

Walk to the Cape

Last Friday Eric and I started our long planned "survival" trip to Cape Reinga. We were accompanied by Mike and Nathan - who is the same age as Eric. The plan was to walk from the top of 90 Mile Beach to Cape Reinga taking 3 days and carrying all our own gear.
The short of the story is that we did it!
The long version could take a while to tell, but here are some of the highlights.
Looking back down 90 Mile beach towards the Hole in the Rock from the top of the cliffs. Taking off a heavy pack at our camping spot. Completing the 10km walk on the first day so that we could explore on the second day. Catching and eating Kahawai and mussels for breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday. Finding alsorts of treasures washed up on the beaches: a whale jawbone on Twilight, a sea horse, life belt. Not seeing any other humans apart from ourselves and a couple of fishing boats on Saturday. Listening to the sound of waves crashing whilst sleeping and dozing. Not being caught by a tsunami - we would have been scuppered as our camp was a few metres above the high tide mark. Being out of cell phone range. Seeing Eric walk and reach the end. Completing the challenge myself. Being stranded on Taupiri Island as the tide came in. Seeing Cape Reinga from Te Werahi beach far below from a completely different perspective than the usual one. Getting picked up by our transport - Marty's Pack and Paddle from the Cape Car Park - just after we arrived there. Having a shower to remove 3 days of grime when we got home. Starting to plan further adventures.
The pictures show various stages of the walk. I was amazed that despite it being a maintained track that is mentioned in the guidebooks, we saw only one other backpacker in the 3 days, despite it being a holiday weekend. Not taht I am complaining too much. The character of the trip would have been different if there had been more people about. I was profoundly grateful that it was so relatively easy to escape from the rat-race for a couple of days to recharge.
I will perhaps post other news in another post.

Walkin to the Cape trip pics

Link to Stuart's play

Having trouble getting the link posted up! Attempt no. 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHQRjCb8nVc


or try this:

Drama King

If you have a fast connection, you might want to check out part of Stuart's debut to local acting:...
He has been rehearsing every Wednesday night for the last few terms and on Thursday night we trooped down to the Little Theatre to watch him perform.
We were treated to a smorgasbord of dramatic pieces, ranging from classical Macbeth to a modern play on the 3 little pigs - where the pigs have got a scam going where they lure wolves to their death for regular food. Stuart had bit parts in several pieces and played Evilus Ploticus in a Playlet called "Evil Plots".
He did the part well and got some laughs from the audience.
More soon ...">