It's all about the weather

We're at the O'Hara Game Estate, just out of Paengaroa (which is 10km south of Te Puke). We've stayed here the last five nights and have three more to go: on Feb 1st we leave the Bay of Plenty and take the Adventure to Coromandel, beginning in Thames.

We are back up to a family of four, just for this week. Luka is now settled back in Chch, preparing for Year 13 at Riccarton High School, but we have gained another son – Connor's best friend / blood brother Tristan is part of the adventure for a week – he flies back on the 1st, the day before school goes back. We love having him with us & are making plans to kidnap him for future parts of the adventure.

It's wonderful here, the O'Haras are fantastic hosts (Helen brought us a fresh choc/zucchini cake the first night!) and have a hugely interesting setup. About 40 acres, bordered by the Kaituna River, with native bush in the gullies, deer & other animals in paddocks, and an elaborate, zany archery course through the forest. This weekend they are hosting an archery tournament. We've helped get ready for this, building a few features for the course, as well as picking some produce – beans and corn. We're only doing a day's work for the week, and are self-catering for the week and paying a small amount for the use of the house we're in.

The four of us flew into Rotorua on Monday, following our few days in Chch. The day before, there had been a wicked storm. There was still rain & low cloud about the airport & we were told we might have to abort landing & go to Hamilton instead... But no, the pilot managed to get us down OK and we were back in the Bay – yep it's startin to feel like home for us both.. Justy was especially pleased to land here as she hadn't been able to take off from Rotorua last week due to fog & was bussed to Auckland, adding 5 hours to her flight time!

We drove into town & bought a week's groceries, then went to Kuirau Park to show Tristan some hot stuff! There were new boiling water vents that had opened up beside and under (through) the road, also fallen trees from the storm crashed through the barriers.

The grey wet weather persisted the next day, so we took advantage of one of the great things about this place: hot water springs! We headed down to Kerosene Creek (which you can find on the Google Map of thermal hotspots that we have compiled). It was our third visit to Kerosene Creek and the place was very different after the weekend's flooding. A huge tree had fallen across the main pool. The river had about three times its usual flow, so was fast and fizzy! Only warm (26-27 deg.) rather than hot (40 deg.), but all bubbly like a jacuzzi!

Then, just to make sure we all know that these days, New Zealand is firmly in the path of tropical cyclones, we had Cyclone Wilma last night! This photo shows part of the archery course this morning: today's shoot was somewhat spoiled, as even after the water had receded, everything was covered in oozy silt. Gives us a small idea of what our cousins across the ditch have been going through. Most of this video is shot very close to where we are.

The travelling and working style of homeschooling is proving even more successful than we'd hoped. Connor is discovering new capabilities and talents & enjoying what's on offer despite missing his friends and lifestyle in Chch. We mentioned in our last post that Connor and I were going to cater a Rites of Passage event at Tracks... we did this (14-20 Jan) and it was brilliant. Between us we cooked 3 meals a day for 33 people, and didn't miss a beat. We're both so enriched by the experience that we are planning to advertise ourselves as available to cater other similar events around the country in future. Watch this space!!

So, we all spent some time in the shaky ol' town around the 22nd, which was Connor's fifteenth birthday! We had a nice family party (thanks Nancy), and Connor spent a couple of hours in town with his 3 best friends.

Being back in Christchurch was interesting; Justy managed to take in a decent spate of aftershocks, including the 5.1 wakeup on Thursday morning. I was only there for the weekend & didn't feel any... Like all of you down there, we're totally over earthquakes.

However, it's an ill quake that shakes no good... Justy met the EQC assessors at our house, and was told that we will get $11,000-plus of re-lining, re-painting interior walls, ceilings and recladding outside, to fix all the cracks that the quake made worse. Reading the EQC forms reminded me how bad some people's damage is, and we are so lucky to have a livable place that is going to be fixed up minty perfect...

We stayed three nights with Steve and Megan, just around the corner from our old house, they made it straight into our top 3 hosts of the adventure! :-) Wonderful peaceful place to eat and relax... and be entertained by Felix & Frankie! We visited Toni & Charlie – dogsitters extraordinaire! – also round the corner, & I took Alika for a long walk. Justy stayed with Erica her first two nights, and they talked till midnight even though they both knew they should get an early night! We also visited Judy Kay, and took this pic of rimu tree that Brett & Esther grew and gave as a memorial for Adrian.

While walking Alika, & meeting Luka in town for a coffee I bumped into a few more people (Sian and Chandra at C1, Megan Woods, Annette B – a right old catch-up!) On my way thru Sydenham I took some photos and when I got back up here, started a letter to editor – which turned into a 1200-word article! I rang one of the Press editors on Wednesday, and on Friday my article was published: Make Sydenham a walking paradise. And cos I'm now a freelancer, I'm getting paid for it!

So you're all reading professionable ritin here guys, hope y'all appreciate that! Anyway this post is long enough, better sign off & wish you all well. Giz some comments, will try & reply this time!

PS – we have had one stinking hot day – Thursday arvo it was 28 degrees so we was off to The Mount to sit on the beach and swim in some pounding surf! Met up with Charlene and Wayne our friends from Chch so that was an extra bonus.

Lots of to-ing and fro-ing to start the new year

Happy New Year to you all! Paul & Justy, re-establishing contact with you all... we have been very busy and often 'off the grid' so to speak which doesn't make it easy to update this blog!

We're now in Auckland and it's very warm and holidayish feeling to be not Helpxing but staying with Gen. Gen's fifth & final 40th birthday party is happening today at Uncle Ivan & Auntie Susan's house in Takapuna, so we've come up for that. Margot & Arnold are here too - a nice family reunion :)

Luka & Connor flew to Christchurch on Thursday: seems weird to think Luka has relocated back there and plans to go to Riccarton High School this year, it was a surprise plan but a great one and we are right behind him! Go Luka!! Connor is on a 2-week visit, staying with Tristan and seeing his friends... .so its a bit like Pauly and I are on honeymoon at the mo! Tomorrow (Sunday) we drive to Mt Maunganui where we will stay with my dear old buddy primary school friend Nina- Paul will fly off from there to Nelson on Thursday and meet Connor there (flying from ChCh) because from 14-20 Jan they have a paid catering job at TRACKS in Golden Bay cooking for 40 people! Then they fly back to ChCh together and on Jan 22nd its Connor's 15th birthday and we'll have a couple of days to help Luka sort out a boarding situation for the year.. I'm happy to say I will be in ChCh Jan 18th for about a week too. I may turn up with bags on doorsteps around this time..........

Paul was a bit freaked out by how much air travel suddenly was required with all these relocations and job offers etc..he didn't think he'd be heading south to work either! It's all part of the great realm which opens up to you "when you let go of something which no longer serves you your hands are open to recieve something new" or some such quote.

On the 24th we're back in the North, at a HelpX place in Te Puke for a week. Tristan is going to join us there for the last week of the school hols. Then on Feb 1st P & C plan to go to Thames, to stay & Wwoof with one of the guys they met at last year's Tracks event.

As to what we have been doing...
We finished up cooking etc at Lake Rotoiti on 22 Dec, and moved to Waimana about 25km out of Whakatane. We were on a small (3 acre) farm with a family of ten(!) All the kids are in this pic, along with our host Richard. Only mum (Nicki) is not in the pic.
Needless to say, the place fair bustled for 10 days with the addition of four de Spas! We had lots of interesting work to do – the boys riding around the place on the quad bike feeding pigs and chooks each day; milking a goat & 2 cows (yummy fresh milk cream & butter!) Paul and Justy gardening, sanding, painting, fixing stuff and a bit of swimming in the river. For the last 2 days of the year, we helped put up a windmill which was pretty cool.

Christmas dinner was a real treat (roast duck and home raised ham). Boxing Day we had an outing & a beautiful swim at Ohope beach, and the little kids were always an endless source of entertainment! It was a great home away from home for Christmastime, such great hospitality. New Year's Eve was guitars and singing round a bonfire, and we left the next morning to go to Lake Waikaremoana.
We hope you've all had a great start to 2011.. might see you next week in Chch!

Bonus pic - Connor helps prepare and serve special Christmas dinner for the drilling crew at L.Rotoiti

Work and play

We've just finished our Saturday morning shift (9-11; we'll do another 2 hours from 4-6), and have been discussing where we'll go for an outing this afternoon. The walk up the Falls track is beautiful, with a great swimming spot, but it's quite windy today, not so good for a swim. I'm keen to check out Lake Tikitapu (Blue Lake), but maybe we'll save that for better swimming weather too.. and there's the Redwoods walk just out of Rotorua. Anyway before we decide, a quick post, cos it's been a while...

I've been out working most weekdays – yep, two weeks after arriving in the Bay of Plenty, and two months after leaving ECan, I'm working a fulltime paid job again – and with an hour each way commute! It's just until Christmas, dispatching orders and organising the warehouse at The Wooden Toy Box, owned by our friends Nina & Pete. The warehouse is in the Mount, about 50km away from Okere Falls, where we now live, also until Christmas.

Our home is Lake Rotoiti Holiday Park, where Justy, Luka & Connor work for 4-5 hours each day (so do I, on my days off from TWTB), helping out around the camp and working in the kitchen (Jan & Kev, the camp managers, have a contract to provide hot lunches & dinners for a drilling crew of 15 who are working nearby)... which means that we are all eating very well too!

So, JL&C work at camp for our board and keep, I head out & earn us some dosh. I have to leave at 6.30 to catch the Twin City Express, which drops me back here again about 12 hours later. The early start is fine – at least it's light when I get up at half-five – the ride to work is pleasant & gives me time to write or read (Nina lent me Bill Bryson's Short History – been on my list for ages, and the first book I've picked up since we started doing up the house, a month before we left Chch!)

The walk from the camp to the Okere Falls Store, where I catch the bus, is stunning – up a bush clad dead end road for half a k, then down a short track and across a bridge over the Rotoiti outlet / source of the Kaituna River. [Here's a Google Map of it, if it's turned out OK.] The walk at the other end isn't so great – the factory is in the industrial part of Mt Maunganui – but the driver in the morning drops me at the end of the road I work on, so that's cool.

It's good to be adding to our savings – we haven't depleted them too much in the month & a bit that we've been away, but we never know when we might need to use the money, despite our adventure's focus on volunteer / exchange work to see us through... I'll post some thoughts about the financial sustainability of what we're doing, and other such things, later on.

For now, here's a few photos from last week for you to enjoy while we head out to find some more lovely places & take more photos!

Love to you all.. Paul

Luka & Connor outside our cottage

The three pics above are at the Waitangi Soda Springs, by Lake Rotoma.

Justy jumps in at our local swimming spot, the lake outlet / source of the Kaituna. (The bridge in the background is the one I walk across on my way to work.)

Twists and turns...

Dear Friends!

It has been harder keeping in contact with you all than we thought it would be – life on the road is busy in its own ways; internet connections are fickle things; our email programme works beautifully till you press send; post boxes are not a stroll away; this computer finds uploading photos tedious...because of all this we haven't blogged as often as we hoped HOWEVER if you are reading this then things have come together this time!

It's beautiful here at the Lake Rotoiti Holiday Park / Okere Falls. It's very peaceful and laid back and and we are very happy with the helpx work and our hosts Keven and Jan. Connor and I have the task of preparing vegetables etc..to make meals for a 15-strong drilling gang (working on a new geothermal energy field nearby) twice a day and Luka works with Keven round the grounds. Today he did some hedge trimming. Paul has full time work until Christmas at The Wooden Toybox in Mt Maunganui. He leaves to catch a bus at 6.30am and gets home around the same time in the evening! We miss him but it's only till Xmas which is how long we are staying here. He gets the weekends off, we all get Sunday off and the main thing to do around here is swim! And kayak around on the Lake which is impossibly huge and it's the 'iti' one!!

Connor sliding into Rotoiti, in the camp grounds... and our home for the next 3 1/2 weeks.

This adventure is going the way all good and respectable adventures go – with twists and turns in the trail – a few swears and much gnashing of teeth (I am the main culprit for the swearing). Our first helpx didn't go that well and tempers frayed, the work was hard and the food was missing, also any word of thanks or praise. After one of our famous 'family meetings' where we take on the aura of the Osbournes (albeit minus the fame or funding) we decided we would just pack up our troubles in our old kit bags, or rather our way-too-much-shit into our fried-out Camry, and go for a holiday to Mt Maunganui Camping Ground. What a good choice! Family brawl / meeting over, Connor got out his laptop and we all (minus Luka who has taste, sometimes) watched Lesbian Vampire Killers and felt much better. Ja!

The Mount was fantastic as always. My dad came to stay with us for two nights and we really relaxed and mooched and congratulated ourselves – swam, walked round the Mount, (the boys ran round in 19 minutes) went to the hot salt water pools, had cafe treats with dad, visited old friends (I grew up there) Dad bought me new red sunglasses and a Macs Gold ahhh BUT it costs a lot to pay for accommodation and all your meals, and all our towels were wet and sandy so we knew we had to find a helpx position soon as. And Paul found it, this place! (i'd just like to add- chopping veges is way better than slashing gorse and blackberry in the hot sun as we had been doing - see Paul in top pic!) We have a couple more hosts lined up to see us through till about mid January.

TOP LEFT: Nick, Luka & Connor

BOTTOM LEFT: Social volleyball evening at Mount beach. Connor is second from left, Luka is jumping for the spike shot.

The boys are making plans to fly back to ChCh on Jan 6th to see friends (and have a break from their parents) and Luka has the biggest twist in the tail of all. He has decided to go back to school next year to do Level 3 NCEA! We are looking into it.

So, that's sort of where we are up to in all this adventure malarky.

Love to you all, Justy

Plenty fun

Hi there! Today we ended up with a lot of the day off due to heavy rain in the morning. I did a little bit of weeding round our cottage when it cleared and Paul and Luka worked on sanding some chairs for painting and then we were off, just as the sun came out fully, and we went to our pre arranged meeting with another Helpx couple at their property the O'Hara Game Estate just outside Te Puke. They were lovely, the work, learning opportunities and accommodation are fantastic and we will stay with them in January sometime! We picked a huge bag of oranges and an even huger bag of grapefruit from their laden trees and had an orange for pudding each after fish and chips in Maketu on the way back to Welcome Bay. This is a photo I took of a seagull which ate chips out of my hand. Connor says its good enough to be on google images...

We loved Maketu. It's a small non developed old style NZ seaside town. Kids of all ages played on the playground and at the beach without the need for watching adults, the natural world is their backyard and they all look after each other JUST AS IT SHOULD BE! Ten kids spent hours jumping off this cool old wharf / bridge remains into a deep spot into a channel of the Maketu Estuary. Luka and Connor were quick to join them and this is a photo of Luka bombing into the sea. (A much better thing to be jumping on/off than you know what!!!)

Tomorrow Luka and Paul have got some paid work for a few hours at my friend Nina's shop 'The Wooden Toy Box'. So that's good as we are using a lot of petrol discovering all the cool places in the Bay of Plenty of Places to visit!

It really was the Bay of Plenty today: as I weeded I found new potatoes, then we were harvesting citrus and also at Maketu (while Luka and I were buying f & c) Paul and Connor were pulling up pipi for tea tonight. They were a little gritty but hey! We had them with NZ spinach which Paul picked from the garden here. If only Luka liked shellfish and Connor liked spinach it would have been a successful meal!

We're considering having new Year here in the Mount. Anyone game to join us? If you have never been to the Mount you are really missing out! Love Justyx

The adventure begins (and keeps on beginning...)

Naumai, haere mai – from Welcome Bay, welcome to our blog. Now we are settled in and have done our first two days of 'HelpX-ing', I have an opportunity to start this record of our adventure... and once again we can say “The adventure has begun!”

It's been a running joke these past few weeks, to say the adventure is beginning (again), because there have been many beginnings. In the last two weeks we have: moved out of our house in Roker St; left Christchurch (with a tentative, but still flexible return date of August 2011); left the South Island (a one-way ticket on the Interislander); and, after nine nights staying with friends old & new and in our tent, arrived at our HelpX home (for the next month) in Kaitemako Road.

Even before these more tangible beginnings, there were others: my last day of work, signing up our tenants, saying goodbye to Alika (our dog, who Toni & Steve are dog-sitting for nine months!), and devising the plan for the adventure, way back in August (a week before the quake!)

Today it's Sunday, our day off. The boys are sleeping in, and it's grey and rainy (a sou'west, but still 20 degrees – not like Chch weather!), so instead of swimming at Mount beach we will do inside things.. like starting the blog! Luka and I are planning to watch the replay of All Blacks vs Ireland at 12, and like the rest of NZ we are watching out for news that the miners are OK and can be rescued...

A bit about where we're staying and what we're doing... Our hosts have a 20-acre block about 200m above sea-level, 6km inland from Welcome Bay in Tauranga. Most of it is regenerating native bush; they have 6 cows, 2 miniature horses, a goat and a few chooks. There are some massive tree-ferns and beautiful trees (e.g. 6 huge rewarewa/honeysuckle), the harakeke/flax is in flower so we have tuis outside our window, and we have a view down to Tauranga harbour and Mauao/The Mount (well we did before the rain set in...)

So far the work has been weeding and tidying up, and propagating native plants. Luka and Connor have dug out and potted up around 100 ferns, Luka used a line-trimmer to tidy around the vege garden, Connor has been watering pots and learning how to maintain a hydroponic system (it's growing lettuces and other veges, in case you were wondering...)

The work is physical but not too demanding, and there are dozens of little projects on the go here, so there will be lots of variety. We work from 8 till 12, then have afternoons off. Six days a week, but we can choose to do a few extra hours during the week and get a longer break if we want.

Our cottage is really nice – there are 2 separate buildings joined by a verandah. The boys have a bedroom & a lounge (they have turned this into 2 bedrooms) and bathroom; we have bedroom, bathroom and lounge/kitchen. Our hosts supply our food and we prepare/cook it, which suits us just fine. No phone, but a broadband cable – all good. We have it all set up like home... those of you who saw how much gear we took with us will be able to appreciate that! (I'll post a photo some time of the car all loaded up).

Last night we drove to Mount Maunganui and swam in the saltwater hot pools which was lovely, and had a look at the Tauranga nightlife on the way back. The morning is getting off to a nice slow Sunday start, Connor is still in bed (has been reading Inventors of the World – thanks Noel!), Luka is listening to Paul Kelly on his iPod speakers, Justy & I having second brekky.

So I will post this, and have another round of toast... Please log yourselves in (need to set up a Google account – very easy) and post us some comments!