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Published: February 14th 2010
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One of the rare sunny days in New Plymouth - Mount Taranaki in the background Mother F***ing car salesmen, tribunals and good friends!
I must admit we weren’t looking forward to returning to New Plymouth for another two weeks, but had decided that we would probably suggest to Claire that we wouldn’t stay for that long as we had lost out on time due to the van. However as you will later read things didn’t quite turn out as we had planned and we did end up staying over two weeks!!
Well as you may have guessed our van was still causing trouble into the New Year. It wasn’t going to be fixed until we could come to an agreement on who would pay. The car seller had offered us $200 towards the $1800 bill (as a good will gesture apparently - cheeky bastards) which wasn’t really ours to pay. Needless to say we were furious at being ripped off because we were tourists, so Nath went about contacting everyone from citizen’s advice to the queen (well not quite the queen she was busy) finding out what our rights were. Turned out we were right to dispute paying the bill and if the car seller didn’t like it we could take them to court
- excellent.
I won’t go into all the details but we fought for the next two weeks on the cause of the break down. We had to get three independent reviews to say it wasn’t an accidental stone chip but a rusty old radiator and even then the car deal wouldn’t accept they were liable. They still didn’t want to pay until we threatened them with tribunal and all of a sudden they were willing to pay most of the bill, so in the end it cost us $700 of a now total $1900 bill. Not great but better than nothing!!!
Anyway the last few weeks at Hearing Dogs had really only involved, training Tama, showing demos to the volunteers, visiting the socialisers again to check on their progress and you guessed it lots and lots of raffle ticket selling. Three hours at one time we sat in the sun but the locals of New Plymouth were not as enthusiastic as they had been before xmas (same as us) and were getting a bit sick of seeing us at every supermarket (again same as us).
Regardless of the rubbish time we were having the extra time in
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Dr No's cat pretending to be the pope New Plymouth did allow us to join Annette and her husband Chris at their house a good few times for dinner. They are a great couple and had really looked after us when the van thing was becoming a problem. Chris helping us out with legal advice from his lawyer and Annette letting us borrow their spare car so we could at least get out and about (I don’t know why Chris wouldn’t let us use the Mercedes tho!). They are very sociable couple with a lovely house and great cooking abilities, so spend a lot of their time having friends over for dinner, which usual involves a lot of courses and great wine, so needless to say we were well looked after when we went round for dinner.
So early in the first week back, after we had just had the stress of still fighting over payment, we went round to their house for another meal (after Clare had offered to take us to a local pub for a drink as she felt sorry for all the stress we were having) and met their friends ???? and Paul, who were also lovely. We enjoyed about 5 courses in
total and I drank, as Nath was des that night, a lot of wine. It was a great evening with lots of chat and laughs. Just what we needed, as we had started to feel very sorry for ourselves and like New Plymouth was against us!! Nath and I returned to our little tin prison feeling so much better, but I did pay for it with yet another hang over - at least we were only raffle ticket selling!!. In return the following week we took Annette and Chris out for dinner at a recommended local restaurant, the Kauri Cottage. Again the food was great, it was another bring your own bottle place, so we all made our way through about 4 bottles in total chatting so much that we were the last to leave.
We just want to say, if it isn’t clear already, how lovely and how much we were grateful for all the help Annette and Chris gave us. They had been the loveliest people we had met on this part of the journey (obviously Rayleen and Rob for the US were fantastic there too).
Anyway on the weekend we decided that we would finally
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Dawson Falls on a rainy day try and conquer the walk up mount Egmont we had heard so much about. Having been given advice on preparations and how early to leave, we did it in our usual style of planning to get up early, not quite making it so getting on with the walk finally about half way through the day. Not a good idea as it happened to be a hot day but still the best weather and clearest view of the mount we had had in during our entire time in New Plymouth. We had our provisions of good old cheese sandwiches and a bottle of drink (yes one bottle which really didn’t last that long - stupid people). The walk started nicely but soon it became quite steep and felt like it would never end. We did however make it to one of the upper huts after walking the path called the puffer (you can guess why). We were really proud of ourselves but knew going further wouldn’t happen, as it was still about 4 hours trek to the summit (which was still covered in snow) and what with time getting on we made our way back down. On reaching the car park
we saw a topographical map of where the points were on our walk up the mountain and were disappointed to find we hadn’t really gone very near the summit at all, it had only felt like it - oh well maybe another time!!
That evening we went to the local park (same park that had the festival of lights we saw on Christmas Eve) to watch a film outside on one of the lawns. Since we hadn’t managed to go to the outdoor cinema in San Luis Obipso (USA) I was very excited about this. We packed up our blanket and umbrella (just in case) and headed to the park. The film being shown was one of my childhood favourites, Labyrinth so we chose our spot on the grass and prepared for the film. It was a great evening except for the rain that ensued soon after we sat down, but only being light rain it wasn’t that bad!
The final week was a sad one, saying good bye to Tama was hard, but harder I think for Nath as he isn’t used to having to spend time training a dog only to see if go off with
someone else. A few times in the night later that week he caught himself looking for him in his bed before remembering he had already gone!! Luckily we were still preoccupied with the van so the rest of the time flew by as we got more and more excited about finally getting our van back and all the travelling we were gonna do( we had almost got so bogged down with being stranded we had forgotten why we were even here). We prepared by getting the last few items we needed and washing and sewing the seat covers, as hey, god knows when they were last cleaned. We were however as always, disappointed to find the “finally fixed” date moved day by day, and what was promised to be Monday soon became Tuesday morning, then afternoon, then promise it will be Wednesday first thing - which again turned out to be afternoon!!. In the end we were delayed a further four days in total but after a late night of cleaning, scrubbing and packing the van up, followed by Nath having to fix some of the “repairs” done by the garage himself because there were leaks we were finally ready
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Our aim to climb to...... Thursday afternoon. We were quite rightly pissed off and I was wishing horrid things to happen to the car dealers, I think my words were “they should burn in hell” little extreme now looking back I guess. But once the van was clean and looking all shiny and new we were finally off ……….so long New Plymouth, we won’t miss you!!
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