Day Thirty One

---

We have been here almost one month, which means we have been married for one month! We still love NZ and each other! Jack continues to amaze me with how easy he is to live with. It must have something to do with his lower estrogen levels.

The other night while Alison was back at work in the ambulance, the big fireplace in the bar flooded. It rained for three days straight and it must not have been sealed very well on the roof, so the bottom filled up and spilled out. It was decades of ash mixed with water, so we had a nice black sludgey soup to clean up. There have been other setbacks, such as yesterday when light bulbs were just about raining out of the sky. We had just finished hanging all new light fixtures in the bar with too much effort since the parts were poorly made in China. Once they were all situated we turned them all on to have a look. About a half an hour later, the bulbs had heated and expanded and began to pop right out of place, so bulbs were crashing down all around us. Today we had a technological meltdown with our cash register. It just took us two hours to figure out that the solution was as simple as flipping the key pad over. Sometimes it's one step forward, two steps back, but that's normal at the beginning I guess and we all learn, laugh, and move on.

Yesterday was our day off, so we got to tour around the area with Christoffel and Alison. We had breakfast at their house in Huntly, then ran some errands in Hamilton. We figured out that they live just a couple kilometers away from the very first place Jack and I stopped on our first day in NZ. It is a cafe right on the river, I can't remember if we mentioned it that day or not. Crazy! We dropped off a couple of shirts to get embroidered with the Burrowing Bullie logo, had lunch at a Belgian restaurant and got to try an authentic cherry beer, ordered more cakes for the cafe, then headed back to Waihi to go around the old mines. They took us on a trail that follows the old train tracks where they used to haul ore from the mines down to the refineries. Walking through the tunnels was such an odd experience. We walked along feeling the wall with our hands and the tracks with our feet, not even able to see our hand in front of our face. We had flashlights with us just in case, but we didn't turn them on while we were walking just to experience the pitch black. The tunnels aren't big, either. Jack and Christoffel had to duck most of the time. Every now and then you would find a "window" where the miners had broken through the side of the cliff so they could dump the rock straight out and down into the river. At one part we ran into some glow worms. You look above you and would swear you were outside under a starry sky, only the stars are green and happen to be larva.

Jack and I are planning a trip to Ruapehu here on the north island to ski for a couple days. I think we are going at the end of July. The skiing is usually better there than it would be in the south island, plus it is going to be so much cheaper. When we do head down to the south island at the beginning of August, we are going to focus more on the Fjordland.

Business has been great today. With the rain earlier in the week, no one was walking around outside, and very few people came in. I think it should be doing better now. We are mainly just having doing work around the bar, fun sitting around, and eating with Christoffel and Alison. We keep staying up until midnight just talking and laughing. Enjoy the pictures of the trails. We haven't seen the gorge yet, but we will soon!

---