Dave and Drea - Life down under: January 2009

Finally, after 3 weeks of being continuously thwarted in our attempts to go camping by Saturday rainstorms (including a pretty spectacular hail storm that we were happy not to be out in), we took advantage of a window of gorgeous weather to get out of town.

We wanted to get a weekend away from the house, as well as find some time to do some reading, fishing (dave) and knitting (not dave). Due to my lack of success in the fishing arena I've established a new philosophy towards it. My new rule is: if you can't fish well, fish pretty. So we went up to Omarama (and it's pronounced O-mare-uh-muh, as I've been corrected many a time) and Kurow, which are little towns on the Waitaki river renowned for excellent fishing. But more importantly, they're very picturesque.

Drea found a good reading spot.

True to form, I caught a lot of nothing. I found out Sunday morning that where I was casting Saturday night was only a few inches deep and not likely to hold much more than minnow sized fish. And of course, I was standing in the only bit of waist deep water in a 20 meter radius. Have I said that I'm a genius recently? No? Good.

Beautiful... yes, deep... no.

Sunday morning we went for a short bike ride around our camping grounds, swam, read and generally lounged around until the clouds started to gather and we decided to break camp and head home. We stopped just outside of Oamaru to pick Raspberries. We went a little nuts. We filled every container that we had plus a couple of borrowed ice cream tubs and walked out of there with 5.5 kg of raspberries. (Which doesn't count the 1-2 kilograms that we each ate while picking) . Absolutely delicious. We bought some ice cream and made raspberry coulis and5 jars of raspberry-rhubarb-apple jam Sunday night. So good. But it looks like jam for every meal for the forseeable future.

Here's a few more pics...