2 May - Otaki

I attach pictures for those who prefer comics to proper books, and also, to show how attractive Anna's and Kieran's daugher is. I think she looks a lot like me actually. It's not the best photo I have of her, but this is the only one her publicity manager would let me use. Jack looks great too. He's invited me back for his 100th birthday party and I told him I would be there.

Otaki: what a view and what a breakfast. I stumbled downstairs to find our hosts happily pottering about the kitchen muttering something about needing something decent to eat before they played golf, so they had set up a serious enough breakfast to keep us all going all day. We only needed to keep going until midday but it didn't matter. John and I walked some of it off after morning tea.

The purpose of our trip to Otaki was to help celebrate my favourite Otaki Uncle's 90th birthday. Anna had travelled East with Kieran and Bella for the occasion, so it was a worthy do. We ate at Stephan's, and as it turns out, Stephan was a good cook and generous with the wine, so it was a decent do as well. A few peole made good speeches, including Uncle Jack, who has a particular skill in this area, but cheated and said because he was old he forgot stuff. Everyone forgets stuff in speeches - I don't see why he should be able to blame it on being old. We missed Euan of course, and it was tough saying so and talking about it. Euan likes a bit of a do and had been part of the planning. It was hard not having him there with us.

1 May 2009 - Titirangi to Otaki

I started my travels west on Friday evening, 1st May. I will provide a blow by blow description of the event, mostly so my sister has something to read after she has finished reading the her favouriite Leunig book again. However, the three minutes warning has just come up as I am doing this in Singapore airport over the sound of a grisly documentary about the Khmer Rouge. And now, because I had to move the three minutes warning, I have only two minutes left (I also stopped to scratch my left ear). So you will have to wait. Bye.....

Ooops - here I am again. I need to catch up otherwise you won't know why I am in Singapore. Let me tell you about the journey to the airport in Auckland. Because I had been a part-time travel agent for the entire week prior to travelling, I had booked a car park. I felt sooo organised. The parking was incredibly entertaining as you can image - lots of cars and parks and stuff....(yawn) - I'll kind of whip through the local stuff eh, and on to the foreign stuff like arriving in Wellington.

Actually a disadvantage of living in Auckland is that you forget that most of New Zealand isn't quite as warm as Auckland, and Wellington definitely fell into the territory of places that are not particuarly warm in the late evening. Cold really. About 9 degrees. I had panicked so much about Ryan Air's grim warning of having only 15 kg or I would thrown into the Irish sea, I packed a jersey only at the last minute. After all my packing, I managed to leave home with just 23 kg including a fresh apple in my handbag. We turned on Colette, the GPS system, and I switched her ovpr to English, as there seemed little point in getting confused in Wellington late at night. She didn't know where Peter Quinn lived, because I looked for his house in Otaki instead of Te Horo, but she got us out of Wellington very well. I suppose we could have followed the signs, but Colette does a good job, so we like to give her an outing instead of just running back and forth between New Lynn and home.