……I like you a lot, but please make iTunes a bit easier and more intuitive to use.  You don’t seem to want to upload the album artwork without duplicating the whole bloody album, and I can’t seem to view the contents of my iPod just by album on via iTunes.  I don’t want to have to scroll through my entire music collection.  Be simpler.

…… hope Santa was good to you all.  I, to my surprise, got an iPod nano from Rob, which I like very much.  This also means I can listen to whatever I want in the gym and not have to listen to their wierd taste in music. Woohoo!  Got some lovely Green & Black’s dark chocolate too, a meccano set and some snazzy sunglasses.  Rob’s parents got us a speaker iPod dock system thingy, which is cool.   We cooked a lovely dinner (well, Rob did) – roast chicken with roast veges and then merinues and fruit with cream.  Parsley got presents too – treats and a new collar. 

Spoke with Joy last night, who said they’d all had a good day at Michelle’s (apart from the fact that she was the only one not drinking, cos she was the designated driver and responsible person for Jake).  Jake got lots of good prezzies, and Mum and Iain were still there having fun when Joy took Jake home (tired and grizzly).  Spoke with Brian yesterday – he’s at Karin’s parents’ house and said he was having a good time.

…… and I’ve got a stinky cold. Oh well. I’ve got presents!

…… it’s been snowing on and off since Thursday, when there was a bit of a mini-blizzard and it was so cold that my car doors stuck shut.  Now it snowed quite well last night and today, so there’s a good two inches covering everything.  In the overall grand scheme of things. that’s not much snow, but if you listen to the good old British press, you’d think we were approaching some sort of icy meterological Armageddon.  Britain Grinds To A Halt!!  Snowed In!! Gritters Unable To Cope!!  What a load of old bollocks.  It snows for a bit, we all slide about a bit and then it melts.  It’s hardly the high Arctic.  Parsley doesn’t like it anyway – makes his feets cold.

……was had this evening at Rich Aidley and Neil Hanlon’s exhibition “Lifeforce” open evening at The Brewhouse in Burton upon Trent.  Enjoyed the company and artwork very much (particularly Neil’s cow picture, which I covet).  Thank you, guys, for a lovely evening, and I hope your exhibition is a success.

……I’ve lost over a stone and a half off my fat lardy arse!  Woohoo!  To be fair, it wasn’t that fat and lardy to begin with in the grand scheme of things, but I was starting to get unhealthily podgy, so off it comes.  In all great fairness, there’s a reason we all get fat, and this is one of mine.  Pavlova.  Omnomnom.

…… apologies that it’s taken me this long to finish writing up the trip, but hey-ho.  You;ll also need to go back through the blog to the first Holiday post and read up from there.  I considered rejigging it so it read smoother, but frankly, I can’t be bothered – it’ll take forever and I’ve got better things to do   I’ll leave you with an interesting holiday snap. 

Kebabs: the healthy food. WTF?

 

……Thursday 5th – Friday 6th November

Day 18

The Overlander at Ohakune

The Longest Day.  We arose at 5.30am, showered and lugged our bags down the many many steps from Bobby and Clare’s house to the car, where we drove blearily to the rail station in Wellington.  My sleep-fogged brain registered that Bobby only had to pay $8 to park in the middle of town for the whole day. $8! To park for a whole day in the capital city?! Marvellous.  One coffee and cinnamon scroll later, we hopped on the Overlander for our 12 hour journey up North Island to Auckland.  If anyone thinks that planning this the day before flying back to the UK, a word of advice.  Don’t.  It was the stupidest idea ever in the history of bad travel planning.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice train journey with beautiful views, but TWELVE hours of it was enough to make me wish I’d flown or driven.  Anyway – the views are all a bit weather dependent, and we left Wellington in drizzle, so the Kapiti coast was not looking its best.  We did see Ruapehu and Tongariro, the Raurimu Spiral was a feat of railway engineering and mostly the scenery was green and worth looking at, but TWELVE HOURS.  The other thing I forgot was that most trains enter cities and towns through the grimy industrial bits.  Hmm.  We landed in Auckland at about 7.30pm and decided that we could do with the exercise, so we walked up Queen Street to our apartment (nearly to K Road).  Bloody hell, it was a long way dragging a wheely suitcase, but I needed the exercise.  Apartment was small and not as nice as the first one, but it was only for one night.  We walked back to Vivace for our final evening meal in NZ (I’m not counting the food in the airport the next evening).  It was very good food – I had veal with asparagus and some really nice sauce of some description.  We downed a bottle of Freefall Pinot Gris between us, had cheesecake, and wandered back up the street stuffed and tipsy.

Day 19

Lookout!

The lovely staff at Bianco off Queen let us leave our luggage with them after we had checked out, so we left it and went to the Zoo!!  We spent all day there – the weather was brilliant, and all the animals were out.  The Africa enclosure looked a bit sad and dusty (one lonely zebra) but the meerkats were great.  You can climb down under the meerkat enclosures and go through tunnels, popping your head up (in a Perspex dome) in their enclosure.  We saw everything and were hot dusty and tired by the time we caught the bus back to Queen Street.  We collected out luggage and headed off to catch the airport bus.  Not much to say about waiting in the international departure lounge at Auckland airport.  You could be anywhere.  We took off at 11.45pm on the Friday and landed at Heathrow at 1.35pm on Saturday, having eaten the usual airline food and watched a wide selection of movies.

So that’s it folks – the big trip was over.  We liked it.  We’ll be going back

……Tuesday 3rd – Wednesday 4th November

Day 16

Up at 7am (next time, can I do a holiday that doesn’t require me to get up at the crack of dawn regularly?).  Caught the bus into town to get a train to Featherston – a wee town in the Wairarapa, where we got picked up for our wine tour of the Martinborough area.  There were only ten people on the tour (one of whom didn’t drink alcohol) and we were a reasonable mix of ages and nationalities.  First up – coffee in a cafe in Martinborough and then we drove out to the Alana Estate, where several wines were sampled.  Unless you were Bobby, who just necked the first sample without waiting for all the guff about swirling it about and holding it in various parts of your mouth to get the different tastes.  The rest of us were polite and did the swirling and sniffing bit. And the drinking bit.  No spitting here – we were going to drink all of it (no matter how much we didn’t like it).  Next up was Muirlea Rise; a really small boutique vineyard, with a very entertaining owner (Shawn).  He did us the tour, showed us his shiny new bottling doodah (we all went oooh).  He was very proud of his vines and his idiosyncratic approach to making wine, which basically went: it’s different every year – some are good, some are not so good.  If you like it, buy some. If you don’t, that’s ok too.  He was very enthusiastic, and his wine was lovely, so we bought some – a very rich pinot noir; almost port-like.  Lovely.  After two vineyards it was lunchtime, so back to The Village Cafe in Martinborough for a selection of absolutely delicious local and other NZ foods – big fat olives, salmon, peppers, hams, fresh made bread and more wine (and coffee).  Feeling fat and dozy, like dormice, we waddled off to the bus and Te Kairanga vineyard.  Which we were a bit disappointed with.  Bobby was really happy that they were all reds, but on sampling six or seven, I couldn’t find one I liked and neither could Bobby or Rob.  There was tipping of wine and no finishing of samples – blee.  Last but not least was Murdoch James Estate, which was very picturesque and had a big proper cellar with barrels stacked way high.  Their wine was good, although by this time, you could have given me cat’s piss and I’d have drunk it.  Their wine was not cat’s piss – it was very nice.  Then it was back to a wee cafe in Martinborough for coffee and cheeseboard, which was thoroughly enjoyable, and then back to Featherston for the train to Welly.  We all dozed off on the train – sleepy, full of cheese and slightly pissed.  To round off our gourmet day, we ordered pizza from Dominoes and watched Star Trek.  They do takeaway pizza orders online!  How cool!  How easily pleased am I?!  I very much enjoyed the day bimbling round vineyards and tasting stuff and eating nice food, although we started off doing the whole “I taste a hint of passionfruit” and ended up on “that’s crap.  Next!”  So civilised.

Day 17

On our own in Wellington.  Clare and Bobby entrusted us (well, Rob) with setting their house alarm and locking up before we caught the bus into town to go to Te Papa.  We had a bit of a lie in, so didn’t get into town until about 11am.  We planned to sort of look at other bits of town, but ended up spending most of the day in Te Papa.  I do like this museum – Brian and I spent some time wandering round it in 2006 and enjoyed it then too.  Pleasingly for Rob, they had the colossal squid on display in a big tank (a bit like some important dead person lying in state).  It was big, I’ll give it that.  The short movie clip of how they caught it and got it back to the museum was interesting.  I went online and build my very own virtual colossal squid.  Mine is called Bob and he’s wandering the deep oceans.  Occasionally I log in and see how he’s doing.  We were impressed by the skeleton of a blue whale hanging above us in one of the display areas.  I like the geology area too, with lots of information about volcanoes and earthquakes.  We also went to look at the big shock absorbers in the basement of the museum – this is not as exciting as it sounds, but from an engineering and geology point of view it was informative.

In the evening we took Bobby and Clare out for dinner to the Ban Mai Thai Cafe and had some tasty thai food.  Clare suggested we go to Strawberry Fair Cafe for pudding; I’m glad I’d kind of said bugger the diet for the holiday, cos we had puddings that were absolutely huge and very very nice.  Big fat pavlova with cream and passionfruit and a spun sugar creation sitting on the top – the blokes just thought it looked like a tit on a plate (it was sort of boob-shaped).  But it was yummy.  Again, an early-ish night as we were catching the 7.20am train from town.  Bobby offered to drive us there – bless him.  Just as well he works at the train station – it just meant he got to work a bit earlier than usual.

……Sunday 1st – Monday 2nd November

Day 14

Up early without brekkie, checked out and drove to Picton, which took about 30mins through hilly wooded countryside.  Dropped the car off and trundled off to find some food.  Passed a dive shop which Rob couldn’t resist.  I could, given that it was 9am on a Sunday and I was starving and desperate for coffee.  He popped in to discover that dive equipment which is reasonably priced in the UK is astronomically priced in NZ – I think that my Suunto Gecko computer was almost double the price. OMG.  We found a lovely cafe on the waterfront bit and settled down for lots of coffee and good food.  Picton was lovely – I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was a really lovely wee town with a reasonable selection of local shops, a busy looking wharf and marina area, and a really nice park right on the shore.  There was a tiny electric train track with a little station – train rides for 20 cents.  And you could hire little model sailboats for 20c and float them across the pond like you did when you were a kid.  After breakfast, we wandered round for a bit killing time before the ferry.  We came across the Edwin Fox – apparently the 9^th oldest sailing ship in the world.  The bumph said it was an ex-convict transporter which plied various trade routes before ending up in NZ. It was in a big open sided shed with pigeons flying to and fro, so how much longer it’ll be preserved without being coated in pigeon shite, I’ve no idea. 

We caught the 13.10 sailing on the Arahura to Wellington, which takes about 3 hours, and sails out through the channels of Queen Charlotte Sound.  The scenery was fairly spectacular, but it was bloody freezing on the outside decks, and I have to say, there’s not that many places to get a decent view from the inside.  There was a forward facing deck with comfy looking airline-style seats, but they were all taken by old people dozing and not actually looking at the view.  The buggers.  The crossing of the Cook Strait was fairly uneventful and we go into Wellington on time to be met by our mate Bobby.

Bobby and Clare emigrated to NZ several years ago, and I last met up with him when I was in Welly after Joy’s wedding. It was really good to see him and also to meet Clare, who I’d heard lots about (from Bobby) but never met.  They very kindly put up with us for several nights, and Bobby had booked the Monday and Tuesday off work to spend some time catching up.  We headed to their house to eat chilli, drink wine and catch up on gossip.

Day 15

A lie-in!! It was bliss. We lazed over breakfast and headed into the centre of Wellington to have a mooch round and book a wine tour – yes, the three of us had decided that spending a whole day sampling alcohol and eating nice food was the way to go.  We went via the Weta Cave in Miramar and had a bit of a geekfest, poring over the construction of chainmail and weapons from LOTR.  The short film about the development of Weta was really interesting, and the props and models from his films were very interesting.  Even better than that is that getting in is free! How cool.  We drove into town and had lunch, then booked the wine tour and went for a wander round.  Rob had never been to Welly before, and thought that out of all the places we visited, Welly felt like a “real” city to him.  Shopping for stir-fry ingredients, and then home to drink wine, natter and cook dinner, which everyone enjoyed.  Bobby persuaded us to watch Role Models, and I surprised myself by really enjoying it. For all you non-LRPers out there – get the movie and chuckle.  Relatively early night, cos we needed to catch an early bus to the train station to get to Featherston on the other side of the Rimutakas.