Last week was Canterbury Show and Cup week and accordingly we got a provincial public holiday on the Friday for "Show day". The Royal New Zealand A&P Show took place over three days and was visited by Princess Anne. There was also a whole raft of events including big horse racing events including a harness racing day (which is very popular down under). Actually, we didn't take part in any of it, because Def Leppard were playing in Auckland - so we'd booked flights and hotel and got out of town as soon as we could. One has to get one's priorities straight! The flight afforded spectacular views of both South and North Island, and the highlight was clearly seeing the giant volcanoes in the Tongariro national park. We arrived on Friday afternoon, headed to Wendy's ... read more

We took off for our second weekend camping jaunt - this time to Hanmer Springs for the Labour Day long weekend. We arrived at the 'Top Ten' camp-site on the Saturday afternoon and the weather was fantastic - the sun was shining and we needed to set up our new 'beach shelter' in order to escape the heat. We anticipated having to sleep outside that night due to the tropical conditions... After a quick jaunt into town for lunch and to pick up some supplies we headed back to finish setting up camp just as the rain started. Someone had joked that snow was forecast but we didn't believe it. That evening we headed back into town to spend the evening in our favourite Hanmer pub and watched our province, Canterbury, win the Air New Zealand ... read more

Finally managed to use the panorama feature, so the picture above is of Mount Cook and stunningly blue Lake Pukaki. We hired a good car and headed down the south coast for the weekend to celebrate our seventh wedding anniversary. On Friday night we stayed over in the quiet town of Geraldine, which was a few hours out of Christchurch and had a good meal in the local pub and a walk around the town in the dark. Starting out on Friday night gave us the headstart for Saturday's drive down to Oamaru. We had hoped to stop a few times on the way, but after initial sunshine the weather steadily grew worse and worse. We arrived in Oamaru in driving rain and headed to a coffee shop to re-plan our day. A big coastal walk ... read more

Last weekend, in order to celebrate our anniversary (we met 14 years ago!) we took the spectacular 5 hour Tranz Scenic Alpine train trip from Christchurch, over Arthur's Pass to Greymouth on the 'wild' West Coast. From Greymouth, we picked up a rental car and drove 3 hours up the coast, literally to the end of the road at Karamea. We managed an estuary walk before it became completely dark, stayed overnight in a typical Kiwi hotel ('The Karamea Hotel') and then did the whole thing in reverse on the Sunday...well, we had to get back to work for monday morning! We had time to see some of Greymouth (home of the awesome Monteith's brewery), Westport (home of a great cafe for sunday brunch), Lake Hanlon (home of, well, a nice lake...called Hanlon) as well as ... read more

Last weekend, we had our first visitors, Ann and Tom, from England. We had a night out in Christchurch (after going to see Lenny Henry at the Town Hall) and then on Saturday drove up to Akaroa for the weekend. We managed to get a good walk in before Sunday, when it started raining and didn't really stop all week. New Zealand has been hit with some pretty bad storms and there have been states of emergency declared in several areas. This weekend, we weren't really expecting the rain to stop, but it did and the sun came out, so we headed out to the east coast of the city to the seaside suburb of New Brighton with it's Saturday market, 300m Pier, sand dunes walkway and abdundance of Shags on the beach.... read more