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Next stop – USA!! – for a short visit with Robert and Christine.

Doing a count of all the boxes, I stopped at six hundred and ten thousand five hundred and twenty nine Only kidding but it’s amazing how much stuff we still seem to have even after all the kids are long gone and we’ve steadily been cleaning out over the last few months. I guess we were not as ruthless as we should have been.

After this, we stay over with friends, Trudi and Michael – fellow boaties,  collect our cat from the cattery tomorrow and fly her down to really good friends, Graham and Moira, who live in the South Island and have very kindly offered to have her.

Then, on Thursday we fly out

So, I decided to drop the price drastically and put it on auction on Trademe (NZ equivalent of Ebay).

Fortunately, a buyer came along and bid on the auction reaching the reserve price which I had also set very low.

Upshot is that the boat is sold I think the buyer has scored a real bargain with this fantastic keelboat which I have owned for the last 11 years.

While I didn’t get anywhere near the boat’s full value, I am nevertheless contented that I won’t have to worry about her while we are on our travels.

So, Win-Win situation all around

Started with a road trip from Auckland to Gore (+/- 1700 km). the trip included a 3 hour ferry trip across the notorious Cook straight which was pretty calm fortunately. Coming into Picton via the Marlborough Sounds was very picturesque and pretty.

Had a great visit with Leanne, Shannon, Luther and Zeke in Gore. This will be the last time we see them until they (apart from her husband Shannon) meet us in the Bahamas!!! The Admiral will certainly miss her grandsons, but so will I mind you, even though we only get to see them every few months due to the distances.

Next stop Timaru for an engagement party!!

The rest of the house looks pretty much the same.

and then outside our lounge we have the first stirrings of spring – note the dwarf maple leaf tree which is still dormant:

So, spring is in the air but our adventure is taking us into winter – albeit a very pleasant, mild, sunny warm, hot Bahamian winter:)

There’s still much to do, so I don’t really have time for this blog, but what the heck????

So what’s to do? Finish packing up the house; arrange change of address with a thousand places – welllll, maybe I exaggerate – just a little bit really; travel to visit the family in the South Island; attend Shannon’s engagement party and then help her through her hip surgery; then return home, finalise with the movers to shift our stuff into storage; then fly out to the USA. Looking at that little list may make you think that there’s not a lot to do but each item entails a dozen others before or after to enable completion! Ah well, as I love to say, focus on the solution and the problem will take care of itself!

Of course that doesn’t mean that we can stay in the US for as long as we want to. That is determined at immigration when we arrive at the airport in the US. They determine how long we can stay on each entry.

But this is another tick on the to-do list.

So, that’s it – the house is sold unconditionally, ie no worries about the buyers needing to arrange finance or inspections or anything else.

Another tick on the to do list !!!