Friday, October 30, 2009

Down to the wire...

We managed to pack everything up and say a very sad farewell to our lovely flat in Wanaka. We spent a couple of weeks travelling north towards Auckland. We stopped along the way at Christchurch - visiting my friend Boz who worked with me at Cardrona and his girlfriend Wendy - then up to Kaikoura, where we stayed once more with Justine & Barry on their sheep farm. It was lambing time recently and they had an unprecedented amount of triplets, so Justine had 11 lambs she was hand-rearing; they were adorable. They also had 3 calves, Trevor, Bolt, and BJ. BJ, incidentally, got her name because, as a premature calf, she had a habit of suckling on anything she could find - and the thing she could find most often was Trevor's...*ahem* appendage.

Then it was up to Picton to meet up with Josie once more, and we took the ferry over to Wellington. Campsites are few and far between in Wellington so we ended up staying in a cheap hostel which was a bit on the grotty side, and went out for a spectacular Thai meal in the evening. The following day, after a wander round Wellington and a visit to the Te Papa museum, we headed to Palmerston North, which was really just a convenient stopping point - there's nothing to speak of in Palmerston North, it's really just a student town and reminded me rather of Slough. The next day we arrived in Okahune and met up with our friend Andrew, who I lived with in Banff, who had been working at the local ski hill up there as a freestyle coach, and who'd had a chance to come and ride with us down at Cardrona on a couple of occasions and was now heading back to Banff again. From Okahune we drove to Rotarua - a.k.a. Rotavegas - to introduce Josie to street luge and Zorbing. Okay, just to do it again ourselves really, since it was such fun the first time, and that was AAAAGES ago. Everyso often I like to remind us that we're here to enjoy ourselves.

So now we're back here in Auckland. We've been staying here with the lovely Jude & Glynn, who are putting up with us littering their home with our belongings very well indeed I must say. We've had a couple of tasks to complete while we were here, the first and most important of which was selling Jaffa.

I've loved that van since the first moment I saw her. She's been our transport, our home and our most identifying feature for our whole trip and the thought of selling her was awful. Still, it had to be done (we'd considered shipping her back to Canada - but the cost was astronomical!) so we put the sales pitch in motion. We'd sent Jaffa 'for sale' promos ahead for Jude to put up in the hospital where she and Glynn work, and we'd had a few nibbles, even someone who came to see it when we first arrived in Auckland, though as an older couple I wasn't sure it was going to be their kinda thing. We decided to take it down to the Ellerslie Car Market on Sunday morning and in the meantime I put her details on every backpacker message boards I could think of. We got her stripped down and cleaned every little bit, inside and out. We washed the seats, brushed down the carpet and oiled her creaky joints. We reorganised the inside and made her look as lovely as possible. I got some new material and made two new curtains - front and back - since these were the only ones I hadn't replaced in when we were Nelson. She looked lovely. On Sunday morning we got up early, as entrance for sellers opened at 8am, and the market opened at 9am. We arrived around 8.25am and the very moment we parked up, before we'd had a chance to complete our seller's paperwork, we had a couple of people wander over. They were followed by 2 or 3 others, and an American couple who almost immediately asked if they could take it for a test drive. So, only minutes after we'd pulled in, we pulled out again while I took Charlie, a very excited guy from Oregon, through the finer points of the console gear shift. They clearly liked it enormously, and kept going on about how much nicer it was than the other van they'd looked at. We got back and they asked how much we'd take for it. We'd listed her at $4000 - we paid $3500 if you remember orginally - and the couple offered us $3500. I said we'd need to talk about it but yet another couple came up to look round. I gave them the spiele, but the American couple stood nearby looking nervous the whole time. Eventually Isaac took me aside to discuss their offer. Considering the amount of interest we were already generating - and a quick glance around at the competition seemed to explain why, since no one else had bothered to make their vans look nice and presentable so Jaffa stood out a shiny mile - we could have held out for $4000 for sure. However, I wanted to take a price that made us feel good, and also made the other couple as though they'd got a bargain. So I said if they'd give us $3750 now, we'd sell it to them, or they could wait until the end of the market and if it still wasn't sold, we'd sell it to them for $3500. Instantly they went for the $3750 - even foregoing having a mechanical check done because they trusted us! The fools...haha. SOLD...all by 8.45am, 15 mins before the market even opened! We took them into Auckland CBD to get the money out and ended up parking, quite by coincidence, outside the Base hostel where we'd been staying when we met Jaffa for the first time - in the exact same place. Weird. The money was handed over and we drove the couple to the posh suburb of Ponsonby in order to practice driving her. We took 'goodbye' pictures and walked away with tears in our eyes... End of an era.

We had a walk down to the Karangahape Road, whose name is so unpronounceable it's known colloquially as the K' Road, as I had a treat booked for the afternoon. For ages now I've wanted to do a photoshoot, something a little on the risque side, just so one day I can look back and say 'I had an alright body once!' I'd come across an advert for Miss T Pinups a while back and thought it looked just the ticket - particularly since they promise to photoshop you to buggery haha - so I'd booked it up. I arrived at the studio and had my hair and make up done. I won't say too much about it (just in case they're awful!), but I should get them in the next week or so, so I'll post them then for your perusal.

My final task in Auckland was to have a medical done. I need one for Canadian immigration, and it's much cheaper to do it here than to do it in the UK (around £110 over £350) and as long as it was with a Canadian Immigration Designated Medical Practitioner, it was all good. So I had that and it went very well indeed so that's another thing down towards my Permanent Residency application...phew.

So now we've packed out things, put together another box to send back to Canada and we're just knocking around with Jude & Glynn enjoying the start of summer, before we head back to 4 weeks of drizzle followed by several months of snow. Good news is, we've got season passes for our local ski hill, Mount St Louis Moonstone, so the plan for ski bumming is still going ahead!

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

They think it's all over...

...it is now.

Both Cardrona and Treble Cone closed on Sunday. A few days prior to that we had our friend Josie, one of the Canadian girls we met grape picking, come to stay and we did an epic 3 resorts in 2 days stint - Cardi on Tuesday, Snowpark Tuesday night and Treble Cone on Wednesday - and, after literally lying down on the run at the end of the day at TC vowing I couldn't continue, I thought my season was over. I didn't even bother to bring my board back up to work on Thursday but then Saturday brought a big dump*, as is often the way just before close, and I had to get out on something and make the most of it, so I borrowed some skis and went out with Mark, Roland and Stacey for a ride break. We managed three runs and they were probably the best three runs of my season. The snow was amazing, which - no offence NZ - is pretty unusual out here and we found some great drop-ins which were untouched, so we touched them. Oh how we touched them. Naturally we all fell over left right and centre, but that's what a powder day is all about. At one point Roland fell over, and I was laughing so much at him I went over myself, only to find I was now laughing so hard I couldn't get up again. I looked up to see Mark and Stacey laughing at us, causing both of them to wipe out too. Full house! I went out on skis again on closing day, which was not quite as epic, but I did find one totally fresh slope above the halfpipe, so I stood at the top and yelled "I CLAIM THIS HILL AS MINE!" before dropping in. Lovely. It was great to be back on skis again by the way, thus proving to myself that I enjoy both skiing and snowboarding as much as each other in different ways.

On closing day we also decided to have breakfast at the Mezz Cafe, the 'posh' restaurant at Cardi, and just before heading over there I popped my camera in my pocket saying to Lisa 'Just in case Shaun White's in there - you never know!' On arrival at the Mezz, I spotted Shaun White sitting at the next table. Okay, okay, I did know he was up that day, so it wasn't totally random, but still. In case you're not aware, Shaun White is basically the coolest pro snowboarder in the world, and won the Burton Open this year with back-to-back double corked 10s, the first ever in competition, and is probably the only pro snowboarder I'd spot a mile off. The mane of bright red hair helps! But this guy was on the front cover of Rolling Stone magazine for goodness' sake - he's a bona fide cross-over star. Well, seeing him sat there with his coach at the table next to us I just had to say something, particularly with it being our last day an' all, so I went over and apologised for interrupting him, and for being totally lame, to which he immediately replied 'No, no, not at all! Did you want a picture? I don't mind at all, really!' He leapt up and put his arm around me while Stacey took my camera. Afterwards I sat with him and had a nice chat about me learning to snowboard, and about how seeing snowboarding tricks on the telly is a totally different experience to seeing it happen right there in front of you. Eventually I thanked him again and went back to my table to eat my pancakes while he laced up his boots ready to go out and hit the pipe. What a very lovely chap indeed.

Lie in Monday morning, of course, and then off to Ron & Jemma's in the afternoon for a BBQ and a spot of fishing. Ron has a rod, and property that extends down to the river, but has only fished once or twice before, never actually catching anything. Isaac knew there was fish to be had, and had not yet caught anything over here in NZ, so they went out just before dusk with Ron & Jem's son Andrew, to see what they could find. They came back with two trout of pretty damn good sizes! One brown trout, one rainbow. They were duly gutted and arrangements were made for us to come back the following evening to eat the one Isaac had caught - needless to say it was delicious!

So now it's all about packing. It's all pretty overwhelming I'll be honest, we seem to have accumulated so much stuff, as tends to be the way of these things, and we've already got one box to post home to Canada alongside our bags. Whilst we are quite looking forward to being back in Jaffa, and certainly looking forward to heading home after so long away, we're really really going to miss our lovely flat here in Wanaka, not to mention having our own loo and standing headroom. But we leave here tomorrow, amble our way back up to Auckland to stay with Jude & Glynn before flying to the UK on 2nd November. We want to be down in Surrey/London for a week or so to catch up with friends & family before hiring a car and heading up north - although so far we've not been able to find anywhere to stay down south, as everyone is full! So no idea where we'll be - email me with any offers?!

*of snow, of course




Latest pics here