Australia and maybe some New Zealand

Does anyone still have this thing in their reader? If you do here is a bit of an update I wrote yesterday, on a ferry. It's boring.


Wow. I'm on a boat and I'm writing emails and ... whatever. That song is old now.

So, update time, it's been quite a while since I've updated anyone. Here goes. (FYI, some of this got long and boring, a bit to detailed at times, sorry)

The last time I was in Vancouver was ... November 27th or something. From there we flew directly to Sydney (which was awesome and worth the extra couple of bucks to do it, screw 30 hours of flying when you can do it in 13). We made our way over to Kim's friend Bridget's house (who lives with her boyfriend Chike, pronounced Chick-eh) and we proceeded to take over there spare room and call it home for almost 2 months. Way back when Bridget moved to Sydney she stayed with Kim in her bedroom (which was 1 of 4 in the house her and her roommates were renting) where she also lived with her boyfriend (in the same room, so 3 people 1 room and then 3 other roommates). Needless to say Kim felt she was owed one so we cashed in that ticket. B & C live in Newtown, which is kind of a university type part of town in Sydney. Also, there are lots of suburbs, everything is a suburb and all of that makes up Sydney, at least in my mind. The day after we arrived we picked up our scooter from a place where Kim had arranged to buy one from (if we liked it when we saw it). This is where I become the passenger...I really should have passed that f'ing motorcycle test in BC, life would have been a lot different.

The day after that Kim and I met up with the person who was taking care of the cat sitting business (Debs or Deborah) who was so sick of cats and was so happy to give the whole thing back to Kim. So that's when cat sitting started. It was slow at first, 2 or 3 a day, then picked up to 8 or 10 a day, culminating in 26 visits for Christmas and something like 19 for new years. The whole cat sitting thing didn't really go off like I thought it would. Kim had to go and introduce herself to all the people she was going to be sitting for and then also see the new people coming up. She hated this, I mean who wants to go meet random people and hear all their nitpicks about their cat and their building and security and where they throw the cat shit. I guess none of this info is terribly exciting, sorry. So the cat sitting was in Bondi and the living was in Newtown, these are around 15km apart. Kim would generally drive this twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon/evening, sometimes she stayed out there for the day to meet people or to deal with cats that people requested be visited at certain times. I would go with her sometimes but mostly I stayed at B&C's and worked on our websites (we launched the natural health site a little while after we arrived). This annoyed her a bit because she had to go out and do stuff she didn't like and there was a possibility I was at home relaxing doing nothing having a beer or something. Anyway, cat sitting was annoying and Kim was usually driving >100 km's a day on her scooter.

Oh, I never covered why I didn't cat sit. Turns many out people are super picky about who they let in their house and who they trust and I wasn't that person. I tried taking a couple of calls and all the people I talked to cancelled. So Kim did all that. I just worked on a website to take bookings and show what needed to be done that day and show a map of where things were and all the fun shit like that.

Also, it rained and the weather sucked, almost the whole time (coldest summer in 50 years kind of thing). The first 3 weeks (or more) it rained almost every day and was like 20 degrees or less. There were a couple of nice days but not many. Then Christmas came! We house sat for someone in Bondi which was very nice because their place was pretty nice and Kim didn't have to drive so much and the weather got a bit nicer. B & C had us and a bunch of friends over for turkey and all that. I signed up to make the turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes. I was anal about it, making sure we had all the spices and everything turned out awesome (to tute my own horn), everyone loved it, people who didn't like stuffing ate stuffing, it rocked. We got tickets to a club downtown for new years, Architecture in Helsinki played, it was good but it turns out I'm totally over clubs and going out like that and this night helped confirm that. I also learned that the harbour bridge fireworks are pretty crazy, we could see part of them from the club but if I'm here next year I might try and see them instead of a club. Wow, this email seems really down. The whole time all of this was going on Kim and I were both working really hard to get the website working and work on cat sitting stuff and trying to go swimming and see different parts of the city and stuff. Also trying to go surfing but we only made it once in the 2 months we were in Sydney because it's hard to carry surf boards on a scooter and the weather/waves were extremely erratic and so it was just hard to pull off without a bunch of help from friends. The crappy weather also meant that I couldn't (and didn't) ride my bike much which is to say basically not at all. 2 rides in total. One from Newtown to Bondi and the other on Christmas which was the day Kim let me help her cat sit. 1 cat and 4 km's in I got a giant flat that couldn't be fixed. Blah.

January chilled out a bit, we had a couple of more house sittings which was nice (the only catch for them was that we basically felt like we had to clean their whole place in order to leave which made the end of the house sitting really stressful). I was looking for vans on the internet a lot. We didn't really get out and see much of anything other than Newtown, Bondi and a bit of the more downtown areas. When we started to actually go see vans we started seeing more of the western suburbs and shitballs, there is a lot of them. First one we trained to but it took 3 hours return and the drive was a lot shorter, Also, the van we wanted to see was sold but the place still had the ad up. That was a bit annoying but the guy was so friendly and helpful it seemed like he would help us find what we needed. It never worked out though, after going out to the west a couple of times I found a van in Maitland (about a 4 hour train ride away). I talked to the guy and said I wanted to come and see it, he said that someone was about to buy it but if it didn't work out he would call. The next day he called back and I arranged to see the van the day after because the guy was trying to play games with him and the price of the van. We did all the VIN checks on it to make sure it didn't have a shady past and early the next morning I got on a train to basically head out alone for the first time in Australia. The guy met me at the train station and took me around town in his van, let me drive it (which was the first time I was driving on the left side, and it was standard) he was a cabinet maker who broke his ankle and hat to walk with a cane so could no longer to installations, super nice guy and I totally trusted him from the minute I met him. I gave the van a good look over and there was nothing really wrong, a couple of oil leaks but nothing huge. So I told the guy I wanted to buy the van after talking with Kim on the phone. He showed me emails of 3 other people wanting to buy the van, like asking for his bank details to get the deal done, so we negotiated fairly openly and settled on 500 less than he was asking. I was pretty happy but he basically said it wasn't ours until he had the money and he wanted it all in one shot. So I called Kim and she went to get on a train so we could pay for it. Then she called back and said she could just transfer the money into my account and I could find a branch out there to write a cashiers cheque. Personal cheques aren't really used here so this was a great solution, after a bit of searching we found the right bank and the van was ours! I headed off on the highway in the pouring rain to meet Kim 1/2 way (in a place called Fassi Fern of all names), she was worried about me driving through crazy Sydney traffic in the middle of a storm when it was my first day driving on the left. We finally made it home after oodles of traffic and some cat sitting on the way and we arrived in Newtown, in our new mobile home. (Pics of the van are on FB)

So that's the story of getting the van. Then we went shopping and bought a gazebo as well as some old curtains from an op-shop (their term for second hand store, which stands for opportunity shop). The curtains were great, they had the black-out style material in them so we took that stuff and Kim set out sewing curtains by hand. 3 days later they were ready to be put up. I was also super excited about the gazebo, I had been looking online over boxing day / new years and finding out that they were expensive, especially for one that has mosquito netting around it. We randomly walked into a hardware store and they had one on sale for 50 bucks that had netting all the way around, I almost pissed myself I was so happy, it's funny how the things you piss yourself over in life change as you get older ;) This is also 1 day before we leave for NZ.

I guess I forgot to mention that way back when (July or August) we booked our trip around SA and to Australia that we also booked flights to see NZ and Kim's family for most of Feb.

So now we are in NZ, we arrived in Christchurch and immediately hopped on a bus to Dunedin (her home town where her brother and dad and step-mom and step-brother live). Her brother lives in a university style house with 4 other nerds (somewhat reminiscent of the place me and the boys used to live in on Wellington Cres) except their rent is cheaper than ours was, he pays $70 a week. Their place is also a bit dirtier. It was f'ing cold. We had just come from a couple of 30 degree (at night) days and were used to hot so 14 degrees was cold and the house didn't really have heating or insulation. It was fun though, seeing Kim's old town and having her show me all these places that she found magical when she was young. When the weekend hit we drove up to Kim's mom's house. She has a little hobby type farm with a B & B on it. It's a straw-bale house and is totally gorgeous, it's in Central Otago, near Wanaka and Cromwell. It looks just like Kamloops/Penticton area in BC. Her mom's farm has an olive tree orchard and she makes olive oil to sell every year. She also has a bit of other fruit and grapes, and wild rabbits are going nuts in the hills, seriously hundreds of them, I was welcomed to try and cull the herd. So we stayed their for one night and then headed up to the west coast to start camping and adventuring for 4 days. This was great although hard to find places to camp for free that we wouldn't get caught and fined. There were also loads of sandflies, and they are smaller than our mosquito netting. I've got so many bites and it's driving me nuts, I thought being from Manitoba would have prepared me for this but no, insane. Anyway, we saw so many amazing lakes and rivers (all of which were freezing cold but so clear and blue) and glaciers and coast lines. The last part of the trip was up to the gold coast, the north western most tip of the south island. There is so much of the NZ coast that is un-reachable and wild, it's crazy, I never new. Kim wants to do a hike from the top of the gold coast down the west to the next in-habited kind of place, it takes 5 days and there is nothing there, I'd love to do it. The Heaphy track. We should all get together and do it...

I was kind of trying to find a time to propose during all of this camping time but Kim was feeling sick the first day when we had climbed 1/2 way up this beautiful, freezing, waterfall and the next day we both felt crappy so that day was out. The next day I got super sick from either a bug and/or driving on really windy roads that made me get super motion sick. That night we found a place to camp that we were worried about getting caught/fined for so we got up pretty early (730) and packed up and headed out without eating. We drove up the road and before we knew it we were at pu-pu springs. I didn't really know much about this place other than Kim had loved it as a child and had really fond memories of it, we thought we would make breakfast here and see the sights but there was no place to cook except the parking lot and it specifically said no food or drinks were allowed on the trail as it's an important Maori place so we cooked up some coffee in the parking lot beside the 3 other vans that were clearly just waking up, had our coffee and went down. It was cloudy so when we got down to the springs it wasn't very impressive looking but we stuck around for a while and some people came and went and then finally the sun shone through the clouds for a little bit and everything lit up and I realized this was it so I proposed. Kim initially said "really?" as I was waiting on one knee. I didn't have a ring so the confusion was a bit justified. Her mom offered that she could use her Grandma's ring that was being passed down to her (which her mom made sure we both knew when we were there). Anyway, she said yes and we were all happy, we drove down the road to the next town because I told her I wanted to buy her a ring to make it more real (which she was very happy about) and less than 10 minutes of driving later we came up to a place on the side of the road that said Gold, Silver and some kind of stone smithing. We went in and looked but nothing really suited, the guy working there started inquiring so we told him we needed a wedding/engagement ring and that we just got engaged and he smiled and said that he could make us one if nothing suited. This was the first person to hear the news, it seemed odd to tell a stranger before our parents or friends but it was really neat that he would be the one to make the ring so it was special. He said he had gold that was panned from a river not far from where I proposed, it was gold coast gold and it felt really right and so we went with it and Kim had a wedding ring made (not engagement, so this is a very basic ring) but it's really nice. He mixed the gold up himself (it's 18 kt, not 24 because we have no money and I think something harder might be better for rings). The reason he did it himself was because the place that makes it officially doesn't send you back your gold, just gold from NZ because it all gets mixed together in 20kg lots so he did it himself. He buys it from a local guy who pans for it, he showed us 2 vials of chips, and it all seemed to be so neat and kind of spur-of-the-moment magical and so Kim was really really excited. After this we headed to the local town and ate some food at a pub because that's all there was and waited around and tried calling family and went swimming in the ocean (which also just happened to be where the river the gold was panned for met the ocean and we were basically swimming in the river so it was f'ing cold). We both hadn't showered or cleaned up in 3 days so ... we weren't pleasant to be around. We finally got to talk to everyone. Also on a weird co-incidence Kim plugged her phone in to charge it (it was completely dead) and it turned on once it had enough battery, maybe 10 seconds after it turned on her dad called her out of the blue. So random.

So we drove back to the ring makers and picked up the ring in the afternoon after seeing Farewell spit and headed back towards the ferry. That's mostly where this story ends. Last night we found a proper camp ground in Nelson and it turned out that a cabin with a bed was 12 dollars more than a campsite so we stayed in luxury. We looked for a nice place to have supper but all the "just fancy enough to have great food but not so fancy that we can't walk in in flip-flops" were far away, we settled for a bar that had pork ribs on the menu. We both didn't order the pork. Oh well. Today we are on a ferry to wellington to so where kim went to university and meet old friends and then meet up with MY PARENTS! They are out to visit for a month, we will show them some of the east coast of NZ and then fly to Australia and see some of Sydney and that area and then head up to a place called Surfers Paradise where they got a condo style place for a week where we will chill out. Dave Willms is also flying out for a friends wedding so he's going to join us up there for a couple of days. He's going to Byron Bay where Kim has her heart set on moving, actually, she wants to move to Bellina where one of her friends lives and says it's paradise. I can't wait to visit the tea-tree lakes near-by there and go surfing all along the coast. After my parents leave we stay up in our van for another week or two and then drive back to Sydney to figure out what we will do with cat sitting and then we don't really know. We want to go back to NZ for June to help pick olives (well, I do) and back in Canada for July/Aug for knee surgery. After that we really have no plans, 0. Just hopefully make some money and travel and live life.

That's the news. That's a really long update, I hope it wasn't too lame.

So the ferry didn't have internet I just wrote all that up. It's the next day now and we are at Kim's friends place and finally have internet to send this.


Done.