Number one

Dear New Zealand,
I miss you.  That is all.
Deidre

PS  And despite the fact that I am currently having a thang with your big rough cousin, you will always be my number one.

Sunset swim at Rapaki

The other evening we drove over to Lyttelton so see a place I didn't really recognise. So many of the buildings have gone that it is now just a shell of its wonderful former self.

But then we drove on around the coast to a beautiful spot that is completely unchanged from how I remember it: Rapaki Bay. There we had a sunset swim, a treasure hunt on the beach and the children dug a sandy pool around a warm spring. While some parts of this city have been changed forever by the earthquakes, others are just as lovely as they ever were.

Christchurch walkabout

Yesterday we went into central Christchurch to see for ourselves what we had seen many times via news footage and photos online. Now I am going to repeat some things that many other people have also said, because they are true. No amount of looking at pictures online can quite prepare you for the extent of the damage to the central city. Whole blocks have disappeared and without landmarks we sometimes found ourselves disoriented. I sought out familiar old haunts: workplaces, theatres, libraries, favourite shops, restaurants and bars. Except for a couple of places they were all broken and closed - many will never reopen. It was one of the saddest walks I have ever done.

Thank goodness we ended the day on a much brighter note; four families got together for a barbeque. Happy to report that, unlike the city they live in, these Christchurch friends were in fine form.

Farewell Raglan, you gorgeous place you

We had ten wonderful days in Raglan. Supercool house to stay in, fabulous company, great food, excellent shopping and plenty of activities to keep us out of mischief. Other people may like the more flashy, glitzy holiday towns but I love Raglan. I even had a somewhat deluded "we could live here!" moment and browsed real estate.

Who knows when we'll next be back there. Hopefully not too far in the future.

Get lost, Evan

A couple of days before Christmas my family headed to Raglan and we have been here ever since. We are staying with my five siblings, their partners, their children, my mother and some friends. Our numbers change slightly from day to day as visitors arrive and leave, but there is a core group of eighteen of us holidaying together in two houses, two tents and two vans. Lots of fun. No punchups.

We do however have one uninvited holiday companion tagging along: Evan. Recently he made a jolly nuisance of himself in Samoa and then Fiji. By the time he made it to New Zealand he was tired and spent but he was still very, very wet.

Evan is of course a cyclone and due to Cyclone Evan's remnants we have had a lot of rain this week. But who cares about a bit of rain when hanging out with family in a gorgeous place? Not me.

The world didn't end

The next stop on our trip was a brief visit to Hamilton to see our old cat Topsy, oh and my sister and niece. Then on to the Rose Town of New Zealand, Te Awamutu for a couple of days. Fortunately the world didn't end and while there we got to enjoy a school reunion party hosted by one of my old school friends ... on my birthday. My amazing birthday roses from her beautiful garden are below. At the party my daughter was able to look at school photos of me and laugh at my hairdo. Curly perm. True story.

If you are ever in that part of the world at that time of year then don't miss the chance to go berry picking. I can tell you from experience that berry picking when done all day for weeks on end as a teenager's holiday job isn't the most fun thing ever, but berry picking for an hour with my family gathering bargain priced, unbelievably delicious holiday supplies was right up here.

Keeping cool

Everyone warned us that having been away from NZ for two and a half years that we would freeze back in NZ. It hasn't happened so far but I for one had forgotten about how icky high humidity can be. The temperature in Auckland was lovely but the remnants of Cyclone Evan meant the humidity was uncomfortably high. Thankfully the friends we stayed with in Auckland have a pool and on our first slow morning there we nearly wore it out trying to stay cool.

We finally felt refreshed enough to go for a saunter around the corner to our friends' local shops. In the five minutes it took to walk there I saw more interesting architecture than I have in our entire time living in Mandurah. We browsed in Moa, Vanilla Ink, a lovely bookshop and a cool giftshop. I found wares I wanted to buy. My partner bumped into someone he knows and stopped for a chat. We had a scrumptious lunch and perfect long blacks at the Monterey Coffee Lounge, feeling quite at home in that establishment's cute op-shoppy fitout. I did a double take when I paid the bill; compared to Western Australian prices it was incredibly cheap. While we sat there watching the constant parade of pre-Christmas shoppers, my daughter - who a few months earlier told me that I don't dress like the other mums at her Mandurah school - commented that the other women in this neighourhood dress just like me. Yes, I know they do, I said. The way I dress (and the fact that I don't have tats and avoid getting tanned) doesn't look odd everywhere in the world.

On day two of our holiday I remembered what a lovely feeling it is to NOT feel like a fish out of water.

Too stupid

For the past week I have been trying to use Blogger on the ipad. It seems I am either too stupid or too fussy because the results I am getting are rubbish. But I have taken the advice of a friend who says that a certain place in the world should have signs at the airport and at every entrance road saying "Welcome to 'This-place-I-dare-not-name'! Please lower your expectations!"

So here goes anyway because I am in New Zealand ... and it is good. Maybe one photo a day is the way to go. Here we are at Esplanade Busport. To get to the first bed we slept in in NZ we took a taxi, then a train, then a bus, then a plane, then another bus, then another plane, then a ride in my sister's car, then a ride in our (lower your expectations) budget rental car. When we arrived we were a tad knackered but it was worth it. I know I am biased but NZ is fab.