Our Wee Farm

Wednesday 13th onwards…….

We were going to head back down to Whangarei but decided to stay up in Kerikeri because we were liking it so much, and while we were here, may as well look at more houses! The next couple of days were spent looking at a few properties and eating a lot of food from a café in Kerikeri ( Fishbone Café – yummy!) However our hearts are set on the wee farm, so some sort of epiphany/madness or something took over and we decided to put in a conditional offer for it, it's common practice in NZ to put in a offer for a house with various conditions – one of which is that you manage to sell your house in the uk by a certain date. We put this condition in and various others – like Lim report and property survey etc.

We ate out one evening at a restaurant called Pure Taste in Kerikeri, with Richard and Vanessa – very lovely.

Also our amex bill is beginning to come in now and stuff is cheaper than we thought – BUT we are making the most of our £’s!!! I suppose our idea of this will change substantially once we only have NZ $.

Now our time had come to leave – so we drove down to Auckland - via Ruakaka a day early cos we had to go to the car hire place to sign some documents – remember the crash…..well turns out that the driver didn’t own the car – it was his brothers, and he wasn’t insured (Surprise surprise) and the brother is refusing to pay. So now the insurance company have to take the driver to court – it’s all got a bit messy. We do have to take back some of the nice things we said about the driving!! Most of it is ok, but every now and then there is some total plonker – that seems to do the most stupid of things! So beware - we found it particularly bad on the motorway in Auckland.


Ruakaka


Me Ruakaka


Anyway we spent our last night in an airport hotel – hotel Centra – cant really recommend it at all!! It smelt of mould – but room service was quite good.

We are home now after a hellishly long journey – I seriously cant believe that I am going to put myself through it again in a couple of months or so. If I was ever arrested and had to go to prison they should put me on a continuous long haul flight – I can think of nothing worse.
(baggage allowance for Singapore airlines – we asked at the check in desk what you are allowed as a one off migrant allowance – the lady told us it is 30kg each – 40kg each for business class – however they seem fairly lenient)

We are ‘home’ now to a house with about a foot of cat hair – no fun having to get the hoover out the second you get home! The washing machine is running constantly and we are both feeling a bit down in the dumps – could be the jet lag, I suppose, but I think not – we are counting the days till we can go back. We’ve both left a little piece of ourselves there.

THE END……………or is it the beginning?

last pic of the trip