Christmas Down Under

It's been 3 weeks so I guess it's time for an update....

On our way to see the Foo Fighters at Western Springs we got the call to say our tender had been accepted on the house! Now we just had the little matter of getting my money from the UK so we could pay the deposit. This proved to be a lot more difficult than we anticipated. Knowing that my letter had been received by the Halifax I decided to chase it up with a phonecall only to be told that I had been misinformed and that requesting money by letter is no longer the proceedure and that the only way I can I can access that much in one go is in person! After speaking to various managers and supervisors over several phonecalls I was still getting nowhere and promptly sat on the floor crying at 2am! I was then told to call my bank manager and after explaining the whole situation between sobs she eventually agreed to release my money! When I woke in the morning it was sitting in my bank account. So the moral of the story is, if you are moving abroad sort all your finances out before you leave the country. It all worked out in the end and our settlement day is February 28th, yippee!

We joined our neighbours for a journey along Franklin Road in the city last weekend. All the houses and businesses are covered in a multitude of lights ranging from the classy tasteful kind to brash and tacky! By the time we arrived there the road was bumper to bumper with cars and the pavements were heaving with people admiring the displays and taking photos! Next we headed to the viaduct to make a wish at the telecom wishing tree. The tree of lights is HUGE and at the bottom there are phoneboxes for you to tell Santa what you wish for, as you tell him the lights on the tree change colour as they travel up to the top. It's very pretty!

On Christmas day we headed to Hamilton for Christmas lunch with a lot of Gerald's family (27 of us I think!). I have never seen so many presents under a tree before! The youngest ones in the family handed out all of the gifts and before long the living room carpet was littered in wrapping paper. Hours later we headed off to the second destination of the day, Whitianga. We had a couple of lazy days exploring the area with a bit of geocaching, eating fish and chips, shopping and hanging out in the sunshine.

We got a quite a few vouchers for Christmas so Wednesday was spent at the sales getting lots of bargains for the new house. It was nice coming home with a car stuffed full of goodies without having to touch our bank account!

Next weekend we are doing the Tongariro Alpine Crossing which is a trek of about 19km over steep terrain. The weather can be very unpredictable so we have bought all the gear we may need to aid us in our venture. Yesterday Gerald decided that I should break my hiking boots in before we do the trek, suggesting we go to the Waitakere Ranges for a little trek and try to find some geocaches along the way. So we jumped in the car and headed west for about 50 minutes thinking we were about to embark on a pleasant walk of about 3 or 4 hours. How wrong we were!!! 7 hours later we arrived back at the car after crossing the twin peaks of the ranges climbing up to over 1400ft! We had to cross rivers, navigate our way through tracks of deep, oozing mud, climb under/over fallen down trees and traipse through tracks that were so overgrown you could barely see them. It was most definitely the hardest thing I have ever done. For about the last hour of our trek it rained making the decent back down even more difficult and causing me to fall more than once. We were both extremely pleased to get back to the car and get out of our very muddy boots. Boots which are most definitely broken in!!! We did find six geocaches along the way and we were the first people to find three of them as they had only been hidden in the last few days. By the time we were on the road again the rain was torrential and looking back at the Waitakere Ranges I couldn't even see the tops as the cloud was so low. We were very lucky that we finished when we did as it would have been an impossible journey down with that amount of rain.

All that remains to say is HAPPY NEW YEAR! We hope 2012 brings good health, wealth and happiness to all xxx