The story so far
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.
