The Trip Begins

The day started off with a heavy frost, but fortunately the roads were clear, and we had no real trouble getting out to the airport. The plane went off on time, after we'd said our last lot of goodbyes. A couple of guys who saw us hugging a son and a daughter and a daughter-in-law and a grandson said they wished they had someone to hug them goodbye. I offered, but they seemed to think that was going a bit too far.

By this time the day was beautiful and we had a smooth trip. There was some concern on the part of the hostesses early in the piece about a petrol smell that was obvious around the area we were sitting in. It turned out that a guy accompanying someone who looked like a wrestler (his name was Big Boy, apparently, and one of the hostesses said she was a fan of his), had some petrol on his shoes, and had to go and wash them. Celia noticed that the hostesses had a partly-finished crossword on the bottom of their drinks trolley, and said she had our crossword machine with her. They told us that they were trying to finish the crossword before the pilots, so we offered to have a go, and in due course got it done - after some making some false starts.

Libby picked us up from the airport after we'd left our two big bags at a storage place in the International section, and we drove out to her new flat - they only moved in last weekend. It's a two storey unit, one of about twenty identical attached ones, and it's very nice: lovely big open plan living room/kitchen, three bedrooms upstairs, three toilets (one downstairs in the laundry, one in the bathroom, and one in the en suite next door to that!). There's a garage, and an outside area at the front, but no grass. Although along the back of the units there's a long stretch of (very wet) grass, and a path leading down to the marina. Hundreds of boats moored, almost as far as the eye can see. Beside the pier at the end of the path there were dozens of little sprat-like fish leaping up above the water level and vanishing again. Further along there was a dredge digging great slabs of mud out of the water, and further along still was a curious device that took boats out of dry dock in the boat-builder's yard, on a kind of sling slung from a crane-like machine that slid along a track on wheels. Very cunning.

About four Libby took us to our friend's place, where we stayed the night. She managed to get a bit lost - although she's doing very well in the Auckland traffic - and while her trip there took nearly an hour, her trip home took about ten minutes!

SO Day

Tomorrow is SO Day - Start Off Day. We leave Dunedin about 9.45 am and fly to Auckland, where we'll spend the day with my daughter and her family. They've only just moved up there. Later in the day we'll go to the Young's house and stay there overnight. They'll drop us at the Devonport ferry terminal, and we'll get a ferry across to the quay, where we should be able to pick up a bus going directly to the airport.
We then fly off to Korea and stay overnight in Seoul. We don't have a lot of time there, because we leave again the next day, but we should be able to fit in a couple of hours in the area near the hotel, and get a little feel for the place. After our overnight stay in Korea (courtesy of Korean Airlines, who have to stop overnight, and therefore have to provide accommodation for their passengers) we fly directly to London. We've been told by some friends that we fly over the Arctic in the process, something the travel agent didn't mention. That will be interesting: as long as we're not asleep!
We arrive in Heathrow about 5 pm, English time, and will make our way to an old friend's house. Old in the sense of she's been a friend for a long time. She's the sister of the bloke who was best man at our wedding. Unfortunately her brother died suddenly quite a few years ago, so we won't be able to catch up with him.
After a few days in London, when we'll be sorting out our English bank account - hopefully all the correspondence we've been getting from them means it's all organised and we only have to pick up eftpos cards and such - and then on the Saturday we leave for Norfolk with my brother-in-law. He's coming down to London to pick us up.
On the Sunday we begin baby-sitting our nephew's house while he and his family go off for a holiday. We'll also be baby-sitting their year-old dog, which will be fun - and will assure we get out and do some walking, something we've been badly lacking in over the last few weeks.
That's the current plan; we'll let you know whether it all goes according to Hoyle!

Snow

Snow.

Just to let us know that it really is winter we're escaping from (on Monday) it's been snowing since last night. First thing this morning, the ground was covered, but it's cleared a lot and I was able to drive to town comfortably for a last lunch with Ben, (last before we go overseas - not the last ever). However, the rain and the wind are bitterly cold, and even standing for three minutes waiting for Celia after lunch was very chilly round the head.
We're going to have to wear winter gear as we fly out of Dunedin, and somehow metamorphose into summer gear when we get to Seoul. Might be a bit of a trick!
Celia's plan is to leave our heavy bags in Auckland airport overnight, when we stay there on Monday, and just use our backpacks for everything essential. We'll try and do the same thing in Seoul. The suitcases we have aren't too bag to cart round, but by the time you've got a backpack on and you're holding something else, carting a suitcase, even on wheels, is a bit of an issue.
Meanwhile, we're relaxing at my daughter's house, where I've commandeered the computer.

Champing at the bit

I'm at the point where I can't wait to get away, now. Not that I'm not enjoying being at my daughter's place; we feel at ease there, and it's not like we're 'visitors.' And the agents who are looking after the house have already rung twice about things; I passed the woman onto Celia the second time. She'll sort 'em!

I don't feel as though my house is home anymore – no doubt it will be once we're back and settled again – but in the meantime, we're in a kind of limbo, and still not thoroughly packed. At the last stages of leaving home, we still hadn't decided exactly on what we're taking, and so we have some clothes that we'll be leaving behind. It's hard trying to think about dressing for six months.

I don't remember having this kind of indecision when I first went to England, forty years ago. Being young, I probably ignored all my mother's advice about what I should take, and took things that I thought were important, such as books, and music and so forth. This time, the books are a bit thinner on the ground, and there's no music. But there is a laptop, a thing that hadn't been imagined in 1967, and there are clothes. Probably a better selection than I had previously, but still probably too much.

Last minute things

Last night we came to stay at our daughter's house, with her man and her three children. We exhausted ourselves doing the final clean-up of our own place, spending most of the day at it, with occasional interruptions, and pushed the last bag of stuff into the store room about six o'clock.
Just before we went to bed, Celia realised she didn't know where her glasses were. We looked through all sorts of things, and no sign. Of course, neither of us slept well - one, because we were in strange beds, and two, because of the concern that the glasses might be in the house still.
This morning we got up even earlier than usual and went back to the house. It didn't seem like ours anymore: so tidy and so uncluttered! Not a sign of the glasses anywhere, and to make matters worse, Celia couldn't remember when she might last have had them. We even opened up the store room and searched through the last bag of clothes that had been put in there, as well as amongst the bits and pieces. Hopeless.
She thinks she had them on at church on Sunday morning, but she wears them spasmodically, and it's not easy to remember - for either of us - when she last had them on. I wear mine all the time, so it's no problem! In the end, she decided to go to our eye guy, and see if she could order another pair, if hers didn't turn up. She could, but she'd need to definitely order them, not order on the possibility. So she did. And then she rang the insurance company to see what they'd do if they couldn't be found at all (which they still haven't been). They'd pay 75% of the cost of the new ones. That relieves the burden a bit!

Seeing each other

While in the midst of all the Skype stuff (talking through the computer rather than a phone) Celia has also considered the possibility of a Web Cam. One of her favourite occupations has been looking at the Sheringham (in the UK) Web Cam that’s focused on the car park. Sounds boring, doesn’t it, but to her it’s a way of seeing a little bit of home. And it changes every thirty seconds!
We haven’t gone any further with the Web Cam idea, since it would mean someone here would have to buy one, as well as us. One of the kids may have one that he’s never used, but if so, it would still mean everyone in the family would have to gather round at a certain time to show their faces on the computer. Think this is one to put on the back burner.

Counting Down

This weekend is our last in the house for six months. It's a bit scary, knowing that we're going to do the final lot of sorting out of the place out in preparation for other people to live here. This weekend will be a time for clothes-packing and clothes-putting-away; for making final decisions on what we take in that line and what we don't – and how much of my suitcase can be taken over by my wife. And then there's all the bits and pieces: medicines (of which we seem to have an abundance - because of our age); umpteen cords to charge up cellphones, the laptop, the MP3 player and so on; papers we need to take; bags for bits and pieces that we'll carry on the plane. It's all a bit mind-boggling. Normally, when you're only going away for a week or so you can just get on and assume you'll manage with what you've got; six months is a bit different.

The thought of sleeping in other people's beds for six months is a bit weird, too, and never having places to put things where they'll have any sense of permanence. The thought of not being 'home' for six months is strange. I've obviously become so settled that the idea of such a big change is almost too much for me!

And then there are things like needing to get up in the night to go to the loo. One of the women who used to volunteer in the shop was away from home once (when she was only about 75) and got up in the middle of the night – and walked into the edge of a door. She had a mark right down her face and chest, and wasn't well for months afterwards. I don't usually walk into things in the night (because I know where everything is) but in other people's homes it's a different story. And you don't want to wake anyone! As I say, I'm normally familiar with my own home, but one night I woke up, didn't quite bring my brain with me, and scrabbled against a wall trying to figure out where the door had gone – and it wasn't even the wall that the door was in. Fortunately such times are rare.

The nifty bedfellow comes from a StumbleUpon page.

Bearly Coping

The half a dozen teddy bears that we've got in the house (there are two more upstairs) have been ganging up on us. They want to go to England, and definitely don't want to be stuck in a room with all the bits and pieces that we're storing, for six months. They sit together with one of the large rugs wrapped around them, either watching telly, or muttering amongst themselves, and the other day, we came into the small lounge to find they'd written a note on an envelope: We're going to England, and we don't have to pack! I've tried to convince them that bears hibernate in the winter, so they won't even notice that we're gone, but they're not persuaded.

I'm not sure where all these bears have suddenly come from: there's Teddy, of course, who've been round almost as long as I have and has come back into view again after having been in hiding for years; there's Bill, with his little hooded jacket, his fluffy hair that gets in his eyes, and his please-love-me-because-I'm-a-pathetic-little-bear look – I suspect he's the ringleader because he thinks he's the most favoured. Balthazar, of course, just sits there being good and never saying a word out of place. He came to NZ from England with P G Tips, the scrawny and rather ugly little white bear who unaccountably went missing when the kids were quite young. He and Balthazar were in a trunk that got delayed on the way back from England, and I think we were more upset about not seeing them again than we were about the rest of the stuff that was in the trunk. And then there are a couple of other smaller bears who have come from nowhere: we think bears are breeding in the house.

Down come the photos

Yesterday we had another day of clearing away stuff prior to renting out the house. It’s amazing how many bits there are. Do we just live in a house normally with so much stuff and never notice 90% of it? That’s scary.
Cleared away a lot of the framed photos of all the kids and grandchildren, and of me in the three plays I’ve done, as well as the large painting Wally Crossman gave us some years ago (in return for Celia doing gibbing at her house). And then I took down all the photos from our photo board, some of which are real oldies from when our own children were small, or going to school for the first time, or having birthday parties, or looking the spitting image of their own children, or Celia holding up the first salmon she caught. (She’s just been sitting beside me eating salmon on toast!)
The house is looking distinctly bare. Maybe we just keep all this stuff around us to make us feel warm.

Need new glasses, perhaps

I’ve just noticed in the photo that accompanies this blog the phone on top of the CD shelves appears to be pointing at my head – and there’s something else sticking straight up out of my scalp! At least that’s what it looks like at first glance. It’s actually the edge of the door. How our eyes can deceive us.

Insuring the car

Trying to insure the car my brother-in-law has bought on our behalf has been a bit of an issue. Some insurers want almost as much for the insurance as we've paid for the car. Some want to charge us a lot more for a six months' premium than for a year.

Celia tried getting a quote online with one crowd, and got stuck at a certain point each time. Seems that she may have 'answered one of the questions in an unfavorable way.' In the end she emailed them and got a response late last night. Rather than trying the whole thing again, we rang the English number, got through to the guy who written the email (how's that for amazing?), and he was very helpful. What a difference it makes when you get someone who's helpful. (Like yesterday morning I rang the Dept of Justice because they'd sent the police report on my convictions – there aren't any convictions, by the way – in the name of Crown. I find that pretty amazing too, that they should have my name wrong but my details right. But at least when I rang I got straight through to someone who was also helpful, and promised to get onto it straight away.)

This morning we had an email with all the insurance details we needed – price is still on the high side, comparatively, but better than some of the others, so we'll probably go with it. But whatever we do, the cost of insuring a comparatively cheap car is ridiculous.

The photograph is supposed to be of a Peugeot 306 XR hatchback - which is what we're trying to insure.

National Trust membership

One of my in-laws has been trying to email us for a few weeks, but unfortunately she was still emailing my old email address, which I haven't been checking for some time. (Though when I did check, there were some 665 emails awaiting me – 95% of them spam.)

Amongst other things, she wanted to let us know about the NZ branch of the National Trust through whom we can get a membership that will enable us to get into National Trust places in the UK, either free, or at a discount. And it reduces the parking fee as well. Furthermore, getting a membership in NZ is more economical than getting one in England. Now how would you find out about something like that?

So of course we've followed her advice, and taken up a family membership. This means if we have any grand-nieces or nephews that we'd like to take on a trip to one of these places, we can take them on the same basis as ourselves. We don't really know these grand-nieces or nephews as yet, except by the reports we've received from their grandfather, so it will depend what they think of their never-before-seen and aged relations from over the sea. Hopefully we'll get on with them as well as we get on with our own grandchildren.

Only so many more sleeps!

I'm finally starting to feel as though the trip to England has some reality about it. Our suitcases have some clothes in them (far more in my wife's than in mine) and most of the stuff that can be put away is away. (Except for a certain recalcitrant couch.)

Celia's been testing out Skype with the kids, and it's working, for the most part. Though it does seem rather odd to me to be talking through a computer.

I'm having to think seriously about the dates we're going to contact the Electricity people and the phone, and how we're going to do that while still working and such. I'm counting down the days till I finish this job – a great incentive to look forward, I can tell you! This job has almost put me off work for good…work with difficult people, that is.

I'm not sure I'm looking forward to the day I leave, however. There'll be plenty of people I'll be sorry to say goodbye to, even though I've only known them for four months or so, but there are a few I'll be happy to farewell. In my worst moments I feel like telling them what I really think, but I won't. It won't achieve anything at that point, and I'm not even sure that it would make a dent in their self-satisfaction.

We have a car waiting for us in England, courtesy of my brother-in-law. Trying to arrange some insurance for it has been a bit of a mission; in fact, it might cost almost as much to insure it as it's cost to pay for it because we're not residing in England permanently. We'll have to keep working on this.

And we have accommodation organized for several weeks already. Filling in the gaps will be the exciting part!

Removal

One of my wife’s aims before we left was to move our relatively new lounge suite into the littlish room where we’re storing everything. No problem in terms of room in the storage area, but, we discovered, considerable problems in terms of access to it. We got the first, smaller, couch in, with some difficulty, and the lazy-boy chair. But, in spite of struggling for an hour, moving the larger couch back and forward in the hall and turning it upside down and around the other way, there was no way we could get it into the store room. We exercised our brains in every which way, but nothing was going to make that couch go where we wanted it to go.
The problem was that the doorway to the lounge is just a little taller than the doorway to the store room. So, while we could just squeeze the couch out of the lounge, there was no way we could get it through the smaller door, hampered as we were by the doorway on the opposite side, to our bedroom, being not directly opposite, but just off-centre.
Sadly, we had to manoeuvre the large couch back into the lounge again, where we’ll cover it with some blankets in the hope that any spillages from the family that’s going to stay here won’t affect it. So it goes.

Don't bank on it...

Yesterday we received a letter from the Bank in the UK that we're going to be dealing with, asking us to either send them a pin number to enable internet banking, or to ring the number through. Since it was ten o'clock at night when I talked about this with my wife, we decided to ring.

What a schemozzle! For some reason the letter had come addressed only to my wife, so she made the call, while I listened in. The guy at the bank, when they finally answered after a variety of options were presented, and after putting in our account number to help them identify us, didn't really know what my wife was talking about. He said he'd have to ask her several questions, some of which she might have to go away and check and ring back with the answers (!). Anyway, he first asked for her date of birth, which wasn't too much of a problem for her, and then asked if she had a debit card. She said no, because we're due to pick up cards and such when we get to England. That seemed to stump him, somehow, and he asked her to hold for a moment while he went to confer with someone else.

At that point, some canned music came on the phone. It sounded like a tape that's been used over and over, and was wearing out. Not only that, it was the same piece played over and over, some unidentifiable piece played mostly on a piano. We had the joy of listening to it two and a half times through before the bloke came back on the line. A long confer, by the sound of it.

The music reminded me of the canned music used in the public toilets here in Dunedin It's a short piece played on a piano, and on an average visit to the toilet, you'll hear it played at least twice. It has a glitch in the middle, and repeats a couple of bars as a result. Very annoying, if you're a musician who uses the public toilets a lot!

Anyway, when the guy came back on the phone, he said he'd have to put us onto his confrere, and did. She said they couldn't actually help us, because they couldn't do anything until we got our debit cards and we weren't going to be getting those till we got to England! I suspect that someone in one part of the UK sends out these interesting letters, and puts a phone number on them for a different part of the UK – where no one knows what's being done.

The photo isn't of our bank, by the way.

Drifting away

My wife, still searching for the best options internet-wise, while we’re overseas, checked out wireless hotspots last night, and came across The Cloud. We discovered, after some digging, that it would probably be more economical to sign on with them for a year, even though we’re only going to be there six months, than to buy cards for limited times. As far as we can make out, if we sign on, it’ll only cost us 144 pounds, compared to 180 pounds for doing something different over six months. I can’t remember now what the something different was, as I was becoming a bit boggled by that time.
So I think we’ll go for that approach. There are plenty of hotspots around the country, though it might cost us a bit in coffees! But we’ll have access at relatives’ places, I imagine. If not, we’ll be out and about looking for hotspots a good deal of the day. Interesting way to spend a holiday!
Someone at work said, but why would you want internet access a lot of the time? I should have said: why wouldn’t I want to breathe, but I refrained from such sarcasm. There’s enough of it in our office already.

Connectivity

My wife has spent an inordinate amount of time on the Net searching for ways to be able to use our laptop while we’re away. It won’t be a problem when we’re staying with people – we’re assuming they’ll have internet access – but when we’re not with rellies, we’re not quite sure what we’ll do. The laptop is wireless enabled, so internet cafes are presumably an option, but short of travelling around the streets searching for someone who’s got wireless and then piggybacking we’ve struck no gold so far.
We did look at mobile connect, a little device that fits into the laptop and enables you to use your mobile phone as a receiver, but this looks to be a quite expensive approach. We may just have to check things out when we get there and see how it goes. Prices in the UK are quite a bit higher than in NZ, for internet access, but being without it for long periods means I won’t be able to enliven the reading world with my regular posts.
And we can’t have that now, can we?

Living with Less?

At present we're living in a house where half the stuff is packed away - and more is to go away yet in the small bedroom that's been allotted as the store-room while we're gone. We're renting the house out, so we've been advised (and even if we hadn't been, my wife would have insisted on doing it) to pack away things we don't want to lose, or that are of any value to us. There have been arguments over what's worth storing and what isn't. They will no doubt continue - and I will lose, almost invariably. What's a bit shocking, though, is that we're not really missing anything that's stored away already. It goes to show how much clutter there is in this house, and how much of it we don't really need. Okay, a number of books have gone away that I'd like to have more ready to hand, but in general there are things in the store-room that could quite possibly stay there for years after we come back, and never be missed. It says something about our acquisitiveness, or our inability to throw things away, or our long-gone enthusiasm for certain hobbies, or our bargain-hunting traits. Could we learn to live with a lot less? Maybe this is telling us we could. My thanks to mini-lathe.com for the photo of a junk room.

How to Get There

Talking of travel - as we intend to do - here's a little something a friend sent me by email.

1. go to www.google.com
2. click on "maps"
3. click on "get directions" (at the top of the page, not the side)
4. type "New York" in the first box (the "from" box)
5. type "London" in the second box (the "to" box)
6. click "get directions" and scroll down to step #24

!!??!!

This little blog

After a couple of years - or more - or being neglected, this blog is going to come into its own as the place where I focus on the trip I'm due to take abroad in about four weeks. My wife and I are going to the UK (we live in NZ) and I'll be documenting the preparations and the travel, and making general travelling-sort-of-comments as I go.