This entry is dedicated to Ron and Joy We have spent the past few days with Ron and Joy. They have kindly been showing us Christchurch and around. The icing on the cake has been Ron's amazing drinks cabinet; as well as the usual brandy, Bacardi, gin, whisky and vodka was an impressive array of liqueurs (approximately 35); there was even a bottle of After Shock!! (Although, I hasten to add, our days of After Shock are truly behind us.) On Friday we drove alon...

On to NZ We arrived at Brisbane airport to check-in for the 3 hour flight to Christchurch. However, a slight hiccup meant we couldn't check-in as we only had one-way flights into the country and we needed to have flights out. A bit narked, as we had wanted to keep our plans fairly loose we plucked a date out of the air and decided to buy flights to Sydney. It'll actually be nice as we'll meet up with Sara, my cousin and her husband while we are there. Anyway, ...

One month on - where have we been?? Happy 60th Birthday Helen's Mum! Well, we've finally got our backsides into gear and are leaving Brisbane, and in fact, Australia, tomorrow and heading for Christchurch in New Zealand's south island. So, we'll try to summarise what exactly we've been doing for the past few weeks. After about 3 weeks of us being in Brisbane the rain finally started to relent. The area where we are is on what's called a level 6 water restrict...

Continuous rain - not much to report Happy 65th Birthday Helen's Dad! So, to important matters first; we have been informed that the black frilly dude of a fish I referred to in my previous entry is actually blue and is called a Siamese Fighter. Just so you know. George and Janice, two of Andrea and Karl's friends, their 9 year old son Aidan and 2 newly acquired kittens joined us for Christmas day. George and Janice are Scottish but lived in NZ for 10 years a...

Catching up with family Arrived in Brisbane today pretty exhausted. Although we've only lost 2 hours, we had an overnight flight and did not sleep a wink. Never mind, we're now in Matt's sister's lovely house in Brisbane and all our clothes, and, in fact us have had a good steam clean. We'll have at least a couple of weeks here to plan the rest of our trip. I realise entries have been a bit thin on the ground recently so will also spend the next couple of wee...