Friday night was my annual mulled wine and mince pie party. Slightly more subdued than last year – but certainly a lovely evening. I suspect it will be my last one in this wonderful house that I live in…
No rest for the wicked though – cleaned the house on Sat and then off for a bike ride in the port hills with Steve & Michelle and Maaike. Michelle and Maaike and supposedly training for the Spring Challenge.. harumph.
They have the posing down though.
:)
Sunday headed to Mt. Cheeseman – for, for me, what was one of the best days boarding I’ve had this season. Spring conditions (read pretty solid in the morning – softening up nicely by 11am) but thick powder was there to be found..
Here’s a picture of Maaike, followed by a video of me heading down slope. It’s ridiculous how Irish Maaike sounds in this video. Way more than me (not that that’s super hard!)
At reasonably short notice I flew up to Wellington. The excuse was to go to the Open Government barcamp and hackfest. It was my first time to one of these events… It’s an (un)conference where the participants make up the agenda for the day. Really it’s just a good way of generating a lot of conversation.
The theme for the conference is to open up and lobby for access to Government held data so that interesting things can be done with it (well, that’s what I think anyway). Not quite sure where to from here.. and not quite sure what the current appetite within Government is for this sort of thing to happen. Seems to me that if New Zealand is trying to promote itself as a knowledge economy – then the more of this there is the better.
Anwyay.. enough with the serious stuff.. well, differently serious..
Glynn kindly let me stay at his and Jayne’s house. They did warn me that I would have to judge in the pie competition. What I didn’t realise was that I was the single sitting judge. This competition is serious. I mean seriously serious. Check out the prizes and score sheet.
The trophy that they were all trying to win (here modelled by Nic – the previous winner) was the belt and small engraved pot.
So.. I found out that I was doing the judging. This was serious pressure. Had to try and make sure that everything was completely fair and above board. Forgot to take pictures of my comments on each pie – but I was rigorous. Some pies had matching beer / sauce combinations. You’ll see a red plastic gun – which had to be checked in on the airplane as the security people thought it would be a risk… sigh.
The pies were quality – any of them would be delicious for dinner. However, there had to be a winner.. and it was Mikey with the pie below on the left. I would have rather awarded it to someone who hadn’t engineered the situation at Glynn’s stag which wound me up in hospital – but fairs fair, it was good. Glynn one the beer match – and Brett the sauce. Inge the desert pie (citrus flavour is my favourite)
Mind you, I think Mikey may have sampled one too many of his own pies ;)
Still, it was lovely to be up there and hang out for the weekend. Maaike and I should be heading up in November again – once she books the flights (I’m not allowed to book anything .. something about having to be sure she doesn’t have any classes on..)
So the final escapade was on Saturday. Decided to do another ‘easy’ biking trip – this time the “Twizel River Track”. The picture in the guide has serene pictures of parents with young children biking along.
Perfect.
Or so we thought ;)
Much of the track had been damaged by water – as you can see in the above picture, we tried to break some more (unsuccessfully)..
So dum de dum, biking along, singing our happy biking song.. and then the track stopped and this began:
So the river had completely flooded. Not dangerously (at least, not that day) but enough to completely submerge the track for a few kilometres. We sidled along cutting through bush for a while, and then waded back through flooded fields to rejoin the track again.
It wasn’t at all dangerous (at least, I don’t think so) but it did make a flat easy relatively cruisey cycle – into a much more fun one.
Anyway… here’s a video showing the re-entry of (some) of the flood..
Friday was our last day boarding at Ohau – and the weather more than made up for it!
At the top of the chair lift there are steps cut up onto the ridge. So you can walk up, hike along – and then pick a line down. Lots of fun (if a little on the scary side)
On the drive back that afternoon, I (at slightly too short short notice) asked Maaike to pull over to take some pictures of the lakes and reflections. The first one is lake Ohau – the other is just the canal?!?! at Twizel. Stunning.
So – a lovely day. Then, I was looking up and saw blue sky (for the first evening that week).. and it didn’t take too much cajoling to get Maaike to agree to cut dinner short and drive to Lake Tekapo to go to the Mount John Observatory. Had a really interesting and – wondrous evening looking at Jupiter, Globula (they’re cool) the Jewel Box, Nebulae and other interesting stellar objects. Perfect way to end the day.
Finally, a slightly silly video – narrated by Maaike… probably not worth watching ;)
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