Private: 9th October 2006
October 9th, 2006 - Posted in NZ Search - by Sarah|
Well, we’ve been keeping busy since arriving in NZ and it feels like we’ve been here for ages already. When we first arrived we drove our rental car as far as Hamilton where we stayed in a motel and caught up with one of Brendhan’s old mates (Quin) and his family. Then we resisted the temptation to go visiting the glow-worm caves at Waitomo and headed down to Wanganui via the National Park road. Ruapehu and Ngarahoe were both in cloud though so it was possible to pretend that they were just mountains rather than huge volcanoes (Ruapehu had a minor volcanic event a couple of days ago)!
We arrived at Jim (Brendhan’s father) and Sharon’s house in Wanganui and spent the next few days acclimatising and investigating the state of Brendhan’s car. On finding out how much it was going to cost to get it road worthy we spent a couple of days recovering from the shock and looking at new(-ish) cars before deciding to go ahead and get it fixed up anyway. [A couple of days of just contemplating getting rid of it had made Brendhan act like a sad puppy so I surrendered - Sarah.] Once we knew it was going to be a couple of weeks before it would be ready we decided to head off and do some land searching in the North Island in Jim & Sharon’s second car.
The North Island is generally more expensive than where we’re aiming to look in the South but we have seen some beautiful places. The first was half an hour up (…and up) a side road that turned to gravel half way along and got steadily rougher until we were a bit concerned about not having 4 wheel drive. If we could happily survive on wild deer and wild pig it would have been a possibility. As you can see from the picture below it’s a bit steep for horticulture. Yes, that’s the house (hut?) in the middle.
We found a couple of similar properties up in North Taranaki on an afternoon’s excursion with Agent Lynley (an entertaining rural real estate agent who would have fit into Twin Peaks very nicely). It bucketed down with rain all afternoon and Sarah managed to fall on her bum in the mud just about here…
We also met some real Kiwi blokes on the way who were “out there and doin’ it”, according to Agent Lynley, despite the foul weather. We also saw a couple of flat pastureland properties that were outside out price range including an organic certified block of about 5.6 ha. It was open to offers but will likely go for way more than we’re prepared to spend ($250,000+). It also had sweeping sea views in one direction and a classic mountain view in the other [it's NOT a mountain it's another HUGE volcano!!! - Sarah.].
We had a lovely lunch at the Eden Cafe in Bell Block run by another of Brendhan’s old mates (Tim). We caught up with Tim and his family and some Hawera gossip. We then drove across to Gisbourne in the hope of catching some surf as well as looking at more property. We camped in a lovely spot right on the sea front (about 30 metres from the beach) and were kept awake all night by the gale force winds and incessant rain which carried on into the next day too. There wasn’t really any property that met our requirements so we resisted the local agent trying to persuade us to buy a saw mill(!?) and headed down the East coast as far as Woodville – calling in at Real Estate agents all the way. Once there we decided it made sense to hop across to Wanganui as we discovered that The Car (see below) was going to be ready the next day.
In the meantime we had also ordered a new laptop which is due to arrive by next Monday. As we had a few more days to kill before we could head off South we decided to PIMP OUR RIDE! Or maybe, given that we have been removing black fake fur panels, de-pimping would be more accurate. We now have a classic tan vinyl interior that is in surprisingly good nick even to the fake chrome strips. Brendhan has added a manual choke, stripped and re-painted the back bumper and the next couple of days will be spent digging out rust patches, filling and re-painting before a final cut and polish. The next problem will be how we fit all our stuff into the tiny boot and tiny back seat when we head South.
