Lyttelton at last

Wow, it feels great to finally be here! A bit weird not being in our new house yet, and we completely buggered up the packing logistics, and Sally's still cooped up in her cage, and it's absolutely bloody freezing... but we're all high as kites.

The remainder of our journey down was pretty easy. A very pleasant drive down to Wellington left us time enough to visit the Te Papa museum, if not enough to see everything in it. It's a superb, ultra-modern, multi-storey space stuffed with far too many amazing things for one visit, the current Monet exhibition included :( Still, we did manage to sneak the rabbit in past the motel concierge and the takeway from Masala was almost as brilliant as last time.

Although we had a pretty smooth crossing, Elly hadn't been too bright on the Wellington leg of the journey, had a bit of a temperature that night and looked decidedly peaky on the ferry. She waited until we hit the windy road up into the hills beyond Blenheim before regurgitating her breakfast of doughnut and chips. Oscar slept, watched vids, did colouring-in, got very annoyed when we didn't stop every 10 minutes for a wee, and was generally very funny and entertaining. Sally and Elly slept and looked sick as chips, but all in all we had a nice, relaxed, fun-filled journey south.

We've been here four days and it already feels like home. It's actually Nicky & Joseph's home that they run as a B&B, just down the street from our new place. Apart from their beautiful house they have two top tomcats, Angus and Gordon, two cute girly chickens who answer to Vivien and Sally and I guess one more lop-eared bunny is neither here nor there. N & J are lovely people, very tolerant of our boistrous troupe and very generously offering to put us up for the same rent that we'll be paying when we finally move up the street. E & O have really taken to them, especially Elly, who refers to them as "our family".. bless 'er :)

It was just getting to be a problem, having stuff strewn about several corners of New Zealand, when the phone rang this afternoon to say our lorry-load was to be delivered tomorrow at eight. Pete and Lois (our new landlords) own Lyttelton's longest-running bar/restaurant, the Volcano Cafe and Lava Bar on London Street, and were delighted to be informed they'd be dragged from their beds at the crack of dawn to receive us, our two jacks-in-the-box, one large removals van and several burly mister shiftas. Thank god they have a sense of humour. They're doing a kind of business swap with a French pal of theirs who has a B&B just north of Provence near the famous Alpe D'Huez, for the coming year-to-eighteen months, and are in the process of packing all their worldly goods in readiness, so it should be a right laugh...

At least I'll get my missing camera gear, the plug adaptors and whatnot that we forgot to pack, along with the wooly jumpers and long pants we were quite certain we'd easily manage without til the lorry-load arrived. One pair of long pants between us and it's been utterly brass monkeys since we landed; thick cloud and leaden skies at first, followed by a stiff sou'westerly for the last 48 hours blowing so hard out of Antarctica you could actually smell the penguin farts, as if preserved in little frozen gas bubbles. The truth is, of course, we're all soft as shite due to 12 months of non-stop summer, so anything remotely close to single figures Celsius has us back under the duvet faster than you can say "thermal underpants".

The pic at the top gives you some idea of the lie of the land. It's a bit hilly. We're going to be living halfway up the crater edge (did I mention the whole harbour is an extinct volcano? Well it is..) a leisurely 30 minute stroll from the top. You can just see our place between the legs of the second pylon. That township out on the other side of the harbour, beyond the reclaimed flatlands of white storage tanks, is Diamond Harbour; beyond that, the Banks Peninsula. We've yet to see either of them but they're supposed to be stunning. It certianly looks very pretty from up here. It's like a whole new world laid out in front of you, something we've been hoping to feel since we left Spain and something that finally, hopefully, feels like it's happening.

There's a load of new pics on the accursed Picassa. If it's as jerky for you as it is for me, try the slideshow but pause it and use the arrows to manually move from pic to pic. I promise to get a better viewer sorted for next time.

Hasta la proxima!

Taupo again

Hm. On my phone, this pic of our Taupo cabin was accompanied by reams of lyrical prose and it's all been conveniently lost in the upload. Exactly how that feels in the pit of my stomach I'll spare you; instead, the main points in brief.

• Lovely autumnal colours on the road south


• Lovely log cabin next to deep, swift moving, crystal-clear river


• First proper outing with Sally rabbit a partial success, no big car probs and only slightly freaking out while on the leash


• The north island is full of Christian policemen and Steptford wives. Our hopes for the south grow ever greater


• The iPhone implementation of the Blogger interface is utter Shite

Wow, that was easy. I should blog this way more often.
Next up: Wellington again.

Last night in Auckland

Elly's pre-birthday goodbye party last week

This is a long, long overdue update but I do have a whole month of good excuses to explain it. At very least, leaving the blogging til now means I've spared you a handful of very lame Easter-related puns, quite apart from the usual eggs-related ones, like rising from the dead, having our Last Supper, eggs-citing happenings (see?) and so on. Then there's the fact that we didn't really know what was happening until Easter weekend anyway. Right up until last Thursday it felt like anything could happen, even though nothing was happening at all, until eventually (as so often happens) everything happened at once. Allow me to explain.

Going back exactly one week today, I was on the phone to a borderline hysterical landlord doing her nut because we had no-one to take over our lease. Five weeks of advertising had brought exactly zero responses. In case I wasn't fully aware of the consequences, I was repeatedly reminded of the massive sacrifices she was making, having to think about maybe storing her furniture (furnished places being very hard to let here) and possibly having her cat shipped out to her holiday home in Australia (as it was quite clear that no-one was interested in a house complete with a sociopathic feline) and oh, the stress and worry etc etc. Never mind the comforting knowledge that, should we leave without finding a new tenant, under Kiwi law we were liable to pay the $16,500 rent for the remainder of the original term. Or that, should the rent be reduced to attract a new tenant, we were obliged to make up the difference.

Which is precisely what happened, although we ended up no worse off. We worked out that if we paid (as already promised) until the end of April, it would cost us around $1100, as we were moving out two weeks earlier on the 15th. If, on the other hand, we found a tenant by the time we moved out, we would save that $1100 and be off the hook. Brains now fully engaged for once, we then worked out that we advertised the place for $40 a week less we'd stand a better chance of finding someone and not be any more out of pocket, even if we did have to pay that amount to the landlord for the remaining 26 weeks of our contract. That's what I was on the phone to negotiate, as well as to suggest removing the furniture and the cat. Suffice to say she went with the rent reduction.

For some reason, before the revised ads were posted up, the phone never stopped ringing. By pure fluke, we found our new tenants within 3 days, and by sheer coincidence they are in need of a furnished place and positively love cats, especially ones with personality disorders. It really couldn't have come any later in the eleventh hour without it all turning into a pumpkin. We move out tomorrow and the new tenant's deposit, which seals the deal, is due to hit the landlord's account at more or less the exact same time our keys hit the doormat.

We Are Relieved.

We're also packed, ready for the removal guys arriving in the morning. It's been a fraught day of tearful goodbyes and frantic last-minute repairs. I'm not quite sure why, but it's at these exact times that you elect to fix the broken hi-fi, choose to reverse the car into the garage wall, change bank accounts, do a week's shopping, take the dented car to a mechanic and have all the tyres swapped around, write blogs, and so on. Moving house isn't stressful enough, clearly. Or maybe it's a bit like riding the Wall of Death: no-one really understands why you do it, but it does make for heart-stopping entertainment.

Somehow in all of this I've flown down to Christchurch to meet up with our lovely new landlords, who, it turns out, are minor celebrities in their lovely little town of Lyttelton. A working port south of the city, once (before international flights) the main landing point for European immigrants and still a popular cruise ship stop, this is the place we fell in love with on our summer holidays. The house is wonderful, full of character, on a steep hill overlooking the port, old but modernised, a garden bursting with huge trees, overgrown herbs, berries and all manner of fascinating plants. There's even a ready-made run for Sally rabbit. It's not vacant til May, but our hosts found us a great B&B just down the street for the same rent and offered to store our stuff in their garage until they leave on their European adventures. It all just fell into place over the space of a week.

Tomorrow we drive to Taupo and stay the night at Rainbow Cottage. Then on to Wellington on Thursday, the Picton ferry on Friday morning and Lyttelton by teatime. It's hard to express, especially after all these tales of woe and havoc, exactly how exciting and positive this move feels. I'll try and keep you updated as we go, along with more details of the new place. Right now I need to get to bed before I think of anything else to do...