We've been on the road, so I haven't had much of a chance to update my blog, but here is a quick summary of what we've been up to - I promise I'll upload a bunch of pictures over Christmas (including all the stuff in Australia that can kill you!).
The weekend of November 19th our friends Tim and Jennifer invited us to the Marine Ball. It is a celebration of the Marine Corp birthday which involved a good deal of ceremony (including cutting cake with a sabre) and speeches from the US Ambassador to NZ and several other special guests. There was a great deal of good food and a rocking party after dinner. That same weekend was the annual Toast Martinborough wine festival! It is located a couple hours northeast of Wellington (near the Hawkes Bay region we went to a few weeks ago). The festival includes a number of the area's wineries hiring live music, specialty catering, and offering plenty of wine to taste (all for a price of course). Every year Carsten and Sarah rent an entire train carriage to transport us all from Wellington to the festival and back home. It was a perfect day and an absolute blast.
Our current contracts with work ended on Friday, Nov 23rd - that night we had an impromptu Thanksgiving dinner with Carsten, Andy, Tim, & Jennifer. It was by no means traditional (Salmon instead of Turkey) but there were sweet potatoes (Kumara) and a bottle of really good Pinot from the south island (courtesy of Ann Marie's boss). We barely slept that night because after cleaning up dinner we had to pack for our trip to Australia and the South Island!!
Early the next morning we grabbed a flight to Cairns, Australia and then made our way further north to Port Douglas, which is the perfect place to get out to the Great Barrier Reef. We had a fantastic time (although it was crazy hot) in PD - we went snorkeling on the reef, took a great rain forest tour, ate kangaroo, and relaxed on the beach. It is shocking how big Australia really is - flying from one side to the other takes as long as going Chicago to LA.
After a week in Port Douglas and Cairns, we flew directly to Christchurch and took a bus down to Queenstown (about a 7 hour ride). The trip goes along the southern alps and the views we had were astounding - snow capped peaks over crazy blue lakes. Now we have a week to enjoy Queenstown - probably the most spectacular scenery in NZ - with some friends from the states (they are meeting us in a couple days). Then we'll take a week to tour the rest of the south island before flying home for the holidays!
I do have one picture that I uploaded before we got on our way. As I mentioned in my last post or two, I've been playing Touch Rugby with a team from work. We just got our team t-shirts, which are possibly the ugliest and loudest shirts I've ever seen. They were part of the "Corporate Challenge" which was a big run/walk in Wellington a few weeks ago. ACC provided shirts to all employees who ran/walked it and our Touch team will be wearing those same shirts. Right before the event started, all the ACC employees who were participating gathered for a group photo - there were about 200 people in these shirts... additionally, about a third still had creepy mustaches because it was Movember (and only about halfway in)!!! Here are three of my teammates:
1 comment:
Wow, seeing all those ugly shirts accompanied by moustaches must have been pretty surreal! However, I'm pretty sure our maroon+green shirts from homecoming a few years back might have been even uglier!
Post a Comment