Sunday, September 28, 2008

Wine tour, friends, and no photos

No photos for this update, but hopefully you will bear with me through reams of text.

On Saturday, Skry drove me and Rok up to Waipara to visit some vineyards. This coincided very nicely with the arrival of my friends Mark and Gillian. They are on a world trip of sorts, and have hired a camper van to travel around New Zealand for a few weeks. They'll be visiting Christchurch later, but this weekend we just met them for one evening. The weather wasn't great, but we had a lovely lunch (Operation Entertainment Book: $30 saved) in the Mud House winery, and visited a couple of other vineyards as well.

I worked with Mark and Gillian when I was in Northern Ireland, and it was really great to see friends from home again. Hopefully we'll get to spend some more time with them when they come back to Christchurch. If nothing else, having visitors coming is an incentive to finish the wallpaper stripping in our house!

After our wine tour, our little convoy headed slightly further north, to Scargill, to visit our friends Fiona and Richard. They have just bought a house there, and it was our first visit. It's right out in the country, miles from anything substantial, and surrounded by farms. I grew up on a farm, and it was very reminiscent of home for me to spend the evening with no traffic, no street lights, no visible neighbours, and the sound of sheep and lambs bleating in the distance.  Fiona and Richard have a fantastic house and lots of land, and I think they'll carve out a very nice country lifestyle for themselves up there. Just hope Fi can survive the commute to her job in Christchurch!

3 comments:

Skry said...

That was a fun weekend away alright! I really enjoyed myself and seeing Fi and Richard's place in Scargill really made me want to get our place up and running as soon as possible. This week's mission: veggie patch and garden edging bricks!

Phil said...

Was that smarmy jackass working in the winery? Oh the delight in throwing my unused vino in the mystery container that turned out to be the water jug...

Jenny said...

We didn't go back to that one - Pegasus is on our black list now after his snotty behaviour!