the saga continues

Welcome back to the Dave and Drea New Zealand Adventure Cliffhanger series.

To be honest, I didn't even realize the point at which I had left off the last post as I was rushing out the door. Anyway, when we last left our heroes, Andrea was flying down the wrong side of the road with Dave in hot pursuit. As Dave rounded the corner Andrea looked back into her rearview mirror and wondered to herself what Dave was doing on the other side of the road (during the reconstruction of events it was learned that previous to this Andrea was wondering why it was taking Dave so long to catch up) . Brief moments later she realized and moved herself in to the correct lane. Pretty exciting, eh?!? Ok, sorry, I guess that's a wee anticlimactic.

Anyway, we also finally got all of our goods through customs and home. It took a lot more work than we had anticipated to get it done however. First off, we had to get the MAF inspection and customs ok finalized. Which would have been easier if Dave hadn't misplaced the packing list for all of our boxes (bad Dave). But with that in hand the inspection finally got scheduled for Thursday.

In the meantime, I went about trying to secure some kind of transport from Christchurch to Dunedin for our stuff once it was cleared. The problem turned out that the shipment of good was just the wrong size and weight. I must have called about 20 moving, freight and courier companies. The moving companies had a minimum load size and wanted to charge their minimum fee of $500. The freight companies wouldn't do it because we didn't have an account with them and they wouldn't do one-off transports. And the courier companies after quoting me $300 changed their minds and wouldn't do it because it was too heavy. So come Thursday afternoon, I was so frustrated by the whole thing I was about to jump in the wagon and drive up there to get them myself. But luckily the last company I called (a company that specializes in hauling sheep to Christchurch from here) said they would do it no problem. For $46.38!!!!! Sweet! So now we have our goods, albeit smelling like disinfectant (from MAF spraying for bugs) and sheep (for obvious reasons). The weekend has been spent doing laundry and some extensive airing out of goods.

This weekend also included a couple of friendly get-togethers. We went to an Andrea's informal department work function where we dominated the one round of non-Dunedin-specific trivia and then got obliterated on the rest. We had a really nice lunch with our landlord and a couple (Erin and James) they wanted to introduce us to, Erin was from Andover, Massachusetts. So we had a nice time chatting with them and after it was over Erin and James took us on a little tour of the neighborhood. So that was cool. We also had our friends Brian and Mary and their kids over for breakfast Sunday morning. We whipped up some of our "now world famous" French Toast. Yum.

Other than all that it's been pretty mellow. We have a couple new words to add to the kiwi/english dictionary. If you are going to have "belgium for tea", it means you are having "bologne for dinner". And at work when someone comes around and offers you some square you should say yes. A square, or as I was offered "a triangle square" is a piece of cake. A triangle square just happens to be a triangularly shaped piece of cake. Go figure.

Today it's raining and as I was walking to lunch in the rain I...

tune in again soon...Same bat time, same bat channel!
cheers!