New Zealand Trip: Part 2

Saturday December 26

Christchurch-Kaikoura

We popped into Christchurch city centre for brekky, picked up a local sim card for my phone (who wants to pay international roaming charges?) and got on our way. I called to check in with Mum and Dad, who informed me that the change to airline regulations had come through earlier than expected and I could have taken my knitting on the plane the day before. Facepalm! I wish someone had told me earlier!

Our destination for the night was Kaikoura and we decided to drive via Hanmer Springs, stopping off to take the obligatory photos of beautiful scenery on the way. 

We had lunch in Hanmer Springs but decided not to pay the fee to go into the hot springs as we would only have about an hour before we had to get back on the road.

In Kaikoura we checked into the Lobster Inn Motor Lodge and headed into the town for a look around. We picked up some supplies at the supermarket and went to the rocky beach. The greeny-blue water against the charcoal grey rocks was beautiful and we thought we could see snow on the distant hills, which made me upset that I had forgotten to bring the camera.

Kaikoura is famous for its crayfish, so we decided that we had to try some for dinner. The shop down the road that sold cooked crays takeaway was closed so we decided to go back to the restaurant at our Motor Inn, in a building with a large metal, wire and fibreglass crayfish/lobster attached to the front.

My plain steamed crayfish was much better than The Man's mornay, but we all enjoyed our meal and The Boy and I shared an Ice Cream Sundae for dessert.

And we didn't even have far to go to get "home" for the night!

Sunday 27th December

Kaikoura - Nelson

Disaster struck this morning. The Boy's Christmas present from Daddy and me was a DSi and games, to help occupy him in the car. He went to turn it on soon after we got up and it wouldn't turn on. We plugged it in to try and charge it again and all we got was a forlorn little orange light blinking at us. It wouldn't charge, either from the mains power or the car charger. The Man got online and found some forum posts suggesting it was an issue with the battery. We hoped there would be somewhere in Nelson that would be able to help.

We started the day by going back to the beach to get the photos we'd missed yesterday. Unfortunately there was a lot of haze so the colours weren't as beautiful as they had been the day before, but The Boy had lots of fun throwing the large, smooth rocks into the surf.

We drove north along the coast until the road took us inland towards Blenheim. We passed the airfield with the warbirds museum, noting that my Dad, a warbirds fanatic, would be distressed by the thought of anyone passing by without stopping!

We approached Blenheim around lunchtime. This certainly is wine country - vineyards almost as far as the eye could see, with stunning hillsides behind.

Eureka! There was a Dick Smith in Blenheim. Surely our DSi problems would all be sorted out. But no. They do not sell batteries for the DSi. We had lunch at the local Brumbies and got on our way again.

The road from Blenheim to Nelson wound up through large hills covered in pine plantations. At times it was narrow and tight and curvy and the driving must have been arduous for The Man. It was very beautiful, though.

In Nelson, we found our motel, The Carmel Court, then drove to Richmond in search of yarn shops. We found Cruella's, the home of Rare Yarns, and I bought some alpaca yarn that was marked down and some Misty in Jade to make a Victoria's Vest (well, at least I thought that was what I was buying. They agreed to post it for me so I didn't have to carry it, and when it turned up on Wednesday they'd sent Brushed in Jade instead. Oh well. They're close enough that I'm not going to make a fuss and try and send it back!) The boys fed the sheep that was out the back.

Hamburgers for dinner, then off to bed!

Some updates and a hiatus.

The CT scan results indicate that there isn't anything seriously wrong with my neck or brain. We think it's just that stress and poor sleeping and sitting positions have resulted in my shoulder and neck muscles being so tight that they made the Physiotherapist laugh, and that was pushing on one or more of the nerves to my arm.

I saw the afore-mentioned Physio last night and I have sore but more relaxed shoulder and neck muscles and a little list of homework exercises to do.

So that all turned out well, I think.

I've managed to get Margot all caught up to where I was before I ripped out 38 rows, and then some. I'm now 1.75 inches beyond the division for the sleeves, and it's motoring along now. I still can't knit as much as I'd like as I am still getting some pain in my wrist, but the wrist has improved and I have high hopes for the improvement to continue.

Today we dug out The Boy's christmas stocking, which I made for christmas in 2005. It's a normal top-down sock pattern, sized up, knitted in 8 ply acrylic (if you look closely you can see the colour change in the red when I ran out of yarn) with a much-shortened foot. It turned out a bit bigger than I was originally thinking of, but it seems kids like big christmas stockings. Could it have something to do with lots of room for presents perhaps?

So I'll wish you all a Merry [insert festive season of your own choice] and I hope Santa brings you something nice.

Here is my version of the Twelve Days of Christmas!

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
12 Storage boxes
11 Lexie Barnes bags
10 Ysolda patterns
9 skeins of mohair
8 knitpicks cables
7 bags of roving
6 top-whorl spindles
5 DPN’s
4 blocking wires
3 sock yarns
2 spinning wheels
and a skein of yummy malabrigo.
(I wish!)

As a final note, I will be taking a short break from the blog and will be back in mid January.  I hope you all have a safe and happy time over the next couple of weeks and get to spend some time with people you love, and who love you and cherish you. I hope you get to have a rest and to take care of yourself and your friends and family, and that you get to eat and drink well, but not too much.

I will be spending time on what's most important to me - my family, and some knitting, of course!

A weekend in the country

We went away for the weekend to celebrate some family birthdays. We had a lovely time in a beautiful house up in the Byron Bay hinterland, with room for all of us, a verandah on which to have some tasty meals, and a great swimming pool for lots of fun and shenanigans.

This was the view from the verandah...

 

 

 

 And here is a shot of the shenanigans in the pool

I gave the remaining two bags to their recipients, who were most effusive in their praise. I hope that means they liked them!

There was lots of wildlife around. None of us saw the platypus in the nearby creek but that was probably because they heard us coming. I did see a gorgeous Peregrine Falcon circling over the house this afternoon and this little guy joined us for dinner last night. He positioned himself near our mozzie coil which seemed like a silly place for a creature who probably would have enjoyed a few little flying insects for his own dinner, but he seemed happy there.

 

I took the opportunity to get The Man to take a few photos of me wearing my February Lady Sweater.

Apart from all of that, I did get some knitting done, and a lot undone. Margot sufferred a huge setback, but more on that tomorrow.

The end of the long weekend

This is what it looked like when I went to leave the house this morning. I waited until it stopped.


I'm not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. I've had a really good break, and I'm quite a lot more relaxed than I was last week, but another week or so off would be nice. Oh well, just got to make the most of what I've got.

I really enjoyed my day out at the galleries on Sunday. I slept in and bummed around the house for most of the morning and got to the Gallery of Modern Art in time to have lunch and watch the hula-hoop display in front of the GoMA RiverCafe.
The very lithe Miss Ra-Ra Sparkle (I kid you not), sharing her hula hoop prowess.
The Warhol exhibit was great, I loved the fact that it included examples of his "time capsules", and Interview magazines and film works as well as the screen-prints, paintings and drawings.


My forearm's 15 minutes of fame. Surely my pass-out stamp can be considered Pop Art?

I wasn't tremendously blown away by anything else at the GoMA, but I did quite like a series of photographs of a Chinese artist sitting waist deep in a river, stamping the water with a traditional wooden stamp of the symbol for water.

In a move quite derivative of the Yarn Harlot, here is the Eyelet Cardi visiting the inflatable pink poodle in front of the State Library.


Speaking of the cardi, I got up to finishing the eyelet rows by Saturday night but noticed a mistake and thought I could drop a couple of stitches back to the error, fix the mistake and redo the stitches back up to the current row.

I'm good, but I'm not that good.

I had to rip back all the eyelet rows, fix the error and do it all over again. I'm still happy with what I've been able to get done this weekend though, and this morning it looked like this.


I think it fits - but it does need to be just a leetle bit longer!


I had a phonecall from the intrepid traveller this evening. He's having a great time in Niseko - apparently the weather has been really good from his point of view. Not too much new snow, but sun and blue sky today. He said that he quite liked just being able to cruise around and he's not desperate for bucketloads of snow. He's got some good video too, apparently, so I'm looking forward to seeing his little ski movie.

A whole lot more than I'm looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.