Happy 2010 people!

Had ourselves a wee summer holiday for Christmas and flew up to Mount Maunganui for a couple of days. We spent Christmas Day on the beach in 25 degrees of sunshine with bright blue skies complete with santa hats, crackers, food, vino, cider and ipod speakers playing white christmas!! We also spent time catching up with friends over many a bbq, subjecting kiwis to Billy Connolly and had a surfing lesson! We spent most of the lesson falling off after about a millisecond only to look up and see the two ten year olds in our group successfully standing all the way to the beach!

Hogmany was a quieter affair secondary to being oncall. Kiwi tv is poor at the best of times (except shortland street, think worse acting than neighbours!) but we were not impressed when the credits rolled on straight after the bells, New Year is not the same without Jackie Bird! We've spent most of January working weekends to build up the road trip fund and looking after chickens, vegetable gardens & dogs! We have managed a few excursions though, last weekend we had a 'day of fun' with Keeley and Mel which involved a superman style zip line across the buller gorge, a bbq on the beach and a night out in Greymouth!! Ended up in the only club which had ? a band playing and what looked liked someone's living room in the corner with Liverpool vs Stoke on tv - random!!

The weekend before we hit the yearly event of the Kumara races - not kumara (sweet potato) rolling as a certain friend of ours thought but the name of a local race track! Spent the day at the finishing line picnicing and losing a couple of dollars, its amazing how many last placed horses you can pick! Highlight tho had to be when Linz got breathalised on our drive home. When asked to count 12345 into the breathaliser she decided to try and bite it, the policeman a little shocked repeated the count 12345 instruction, but again she tried to bite it, cue the policeman looking a little shocked and pulling it away! When Miss Morris eventually figured out this complicated instruction the policeman looked a little surprised at the no alcohol reading!

So now with only one week left of work, our next task is to fit all our stuff from our 3 bedroomed blue box house into our tiny wee toyota! Another January discovery was that the blue box has a roof terrace (wooden walkway with washing line) don't ask how we hadn't manage to notice this before! So have been chilling up there with a wee glass of wine and mountain views when the sun shines!

We have February all mapped out with higlights including swimming with dolphins, Routeburn, Kepler and Queen Charlotte tracks, Ronan Keating and Cadburys World! Hope you are all well and have not frozen to death, lots of love xx