After the amazing rush of the last few weeks, I can hardly believe that we are now relaxing in California with my brother, Robert and his wife Christina.
As you know we did most of the packing before driving down to the south island to visit our family in early September. We spent a very enjoyable few days in Gore with Leanne, Shan, Luther and Zeke before heading up to Timaru where we enjoyed Shannon and Dan’s engagement party and a wonderful Sunday morning that we spent with some very dear friends, Moira and Graham.
(Thank you so much Moira and Graham for taking our 12 year old cat Shiva in – I hope she is settling in just fine and has not been chasing any of your chooks!)
Next stop was Kirwee with Dominique, Daryl and Shaun and we based ourselves there for a couple of weeks while Shannon had her hip operation in Christchurch. Thankfully that all seems to have gone really well and she is already off her crutches and is itching to be out and about.
We had loads of family fun there with Leanne and the boys coming up for the last weekend. The boys had a pre-school disco on the Friday night and we had a baby shower for Dominique on the Saturday - only 5 weeks left to go. Let’s hope she has now packed her bag for the hospital! 
It is very sad though to see Christchurch in its post earthquake state. From the TV and the other media, it’s really hard to grasp the scale of the devastation and only hope that all will eventually come right and everyone can go back to their normal lives.
People are really enterprising though – just on the next corner from the hospital, sitting on an empty site where obviously a building was demolished, there was a Thai take out - cooking and serving everything out of a caravan! And it was very good too.
Once back in Auckland it was a mad scramble to get the rest of the house packed up and into storage – but we did it and after what seemed like a never ending list of “Things to Do” we evenutally boarded the plane on Thursday afternoon bound for the USA. Thanks Trudi and Michael for the last couple of days and getting us to the airport on time. Many thanks too to Brenda and Pete for the airport send-off! I hope you all enjoyed the rugby on Friday night.
The fly out over Auckland was amazing and we had lovely views over the city, the harbour bridge and up the east coast bays.
And it’s been sunny and warm here – although the evenings are cooler with autumn definitely taking hold. We’ve spent quite a bit of time relaxing and doing some last minute shopping.
Last night we went to an Open Mic session at a local coffee shop where Robert and Christina performed. They do this every Friday and it certainly looks like a lot of fun and a really good idea. Then today we visited Christina’s parents, Ria and Willie, in a town about an hour away from here - it was really good to see them again.
We’re having some issues with cellphones at the moment – we discovered that to use our iphones here was going to cost NZ$1 for each text so we decided that we should rather migrate on to the US networks. We had brought my old Samsung phone with us so we bought a sim card for it from one provider and bought a cheap phone from another provider. But we’re having trouble getting texts through to NZ using the NZ phone and the new sim card, so we’ve now borrowed another US phone to put the sim card into. But still no luck. Lance seems to be having similar issues with the new phone. So a visit back to the appropriate stores mught be on the agenda for tomorrow.
Hopefully we get it all sorted soon as we leave tomorrow night for Baltimore.
Hi there
Have been watching this space and nice catc hing up with all your news. Hope you will keep your travel log and when you are settled again put this all together in a book. Interesting to note your difficulties with Cell phone please keep us informed as to what the solution will be. Indian summer has come to an end and am now waiting for the winter weather being forcast. Photo’s are very nice.
Love Estelle & Alastair