Our Adventure

 

went out for lunch today and while there met a couple who knew another couple who have over 130 alpacas as we are going to be getting some of these lovely animals they offered to introduce us to them.

well off we all went and were made extremely welcome they showed us several alpcas and what to look for in the fleece ect, we also rather bizarrely, as we were standing there chatting got to find out first hand what the mating process entails !!! there was this poor little lady "sitting" while "Mr. Stud" who can charge upwards of a $1000 for the priviledge gets down to business !! this can last up to 45 minutes apparantly and it does involve a very weird little sing songy type of noise!! it was definitely not what I was expecting to see on a Sunday afternoon but guess I will have to get used to it !!

rest of the day was spent packing and generally trying to get sorted out.

Less than a week now till we move into the new house. Spent most of yesterday contacting Telecom and the electric company, and visitng the solicitors to sign papers. Doing things like that certainly seem easier here than back in England, although no doubt there will still be the last miniute rush to do something you always get when moving house.

The weather is back to being warm and sunny again, so in a week we have gone from hot and sunny, through snow storms and road closures, back to hot and sunny again.

The children spent their last day at their school yesterday, they have two weeks off now between terms, so when they go back it will be to the new school in Oxford. They all got cards and presents from their friends which was really good, they have only been here for a term after all.

Next week looks like being really busy as there is still the packing to do, sign the final set of mortgage papers and get out of this current house by Wednesday. I'm also going to be in Wellington all day Tuesday and can only take Thursday off next week.

 

today we had our first taste of snow in NZ, we seem to have had a whole years weather in just one weekend it was really hot on saturday when we were in the Botanical Gardens in CHC and then sunday was a bit colder - we spent the day at Akaroa mooching round the shops ect. the tourist drive back can be a little hairaising especially as it was starting to get foggy but its well worth it the views are out of this world.

come Monday however the snow was coming down thick and fast and most schools were closed so the kids enjoyed an extra day at home - the power also went off on 2 seperate occassions which had us a bit worried as our rental is all electric and made of some kind of polystyrene so not the warmest place to be!!!

anyway snow has turned to rain now and we will just see what tomorrow brings - we did learn one lesson today though and that is "don't park you car in the garage while its covered in snow and you've got packing boxes everywhere!!!"

We've been here three months now and I'm still trying to catch my first NZ fish!

Before I left England I sold most of my coarse fishing gear, and just packed the trout and sea tackle. We got here at the wrong time of the year to give the trout and salmon a go, but I've probably tried surfcasting half a dozen times and caught absolutly nothing. I must be fishing at he wrong times, wrong places, or maybe it's just me.

Still you can' beat the locations. Yesterday I went for an hours fishing at the end of the day at Waikuku beach, where the Ashley River joins the sea. I think I saw two other people in the hour and a half I was there, and watching the sun go down and the moon rise over the Pacific was something special - who needs to catch fish anyway............

We arrived in New Zealand on the 13th June and were met by the the very welcome site of Peter at the airport. The weather was a bit of a shock and we wondered what we had done as Pete drove us to our rental, through the grey, cold, damp streets of Christchurch.

Summer had just started in England, and although we were expecting to come to colder weather, just how cold it was for the first few days was a bit of a shock. Everyone had told us to expect cold houses, but actually how cold the rental was for the first few days was another shock to the system.

Things soon picked up though, and the rental, although not being in an area we would choose to live long term, was well furnished and comfortable, and being only a tem minute walk from Cathedral Square was well placed for job hunting and sightseeing.  I picked up a job far quicker than I planned and within 10 days had been offered a job as an IT Programme Manager for a large Government Department.

The first couple of weeks were spent sightseeing around the centre of Christchurch and, once we bought our first NZ car ( a Toyota Lucida people carrier, or van as they call them here), further afield. Christchurch is full of car dealers, lot of them selling imported second hand Japanese cars at very reasonable prices compared to the UK.

We had a bit of an adventure at the end of our second week. Coming back from a day drip to Akoroa we were passed by a car on one of the winding hill roads. As we rounded the next corner we found the car that had just passed us in a ditch. We stopped made sure the driver was OK, and offered him a trip back to Christchurch. It turned out he was a flower grower who had farm just outside Akaroa and had been making the journey to Christchurch to sell flowers at the market in Cathedral Square. I think he was a bit embarassed about the whole thing as he had been making the journey twice a week for years and knew the road really well. We dropped him of at his house and the next day three nice bunches of flowers appeared on our doorstep.

We started to look for a long term rental and found something reasonable in Rangiora. The kids started school before the end of June and I began my job on the 4th July.

The next few weeks were spent sighseeing (Banks Peninsula, Tranzalpine Railway, Rugby at the Jade Stadium) and generally getting the flavour of life in NZ.

Rangiora is a nice place but we started to find it a bit too similar to what we had left in the UK and after a while wanted to find something worth moving 12,000 miles for.

We then started to pine for our own property, and found a nice house near Oxford, at a place called Ashley Gorge (hence the name of the blog). The location was fantastic, it just had a bit larger garden than we had been expecting (38 acres!). We made an offer and after a bit of going back and forth by the agent our offer was accepted and we are set to move on the 29th September.