Leaving Town

A couple of days ago we skipped town. I drove Nicola down to Wellington airport, dropped her and the luggage off, then drove back home, parked the car, and walked down to the airport myself. A couple of hours later we were winging our way across the Tasman to Melbourne.

When we landed in Melbourne it was raining. Undeterred, we went to the car hire shop and collected a Toyota Corolla, and drove up through the Macedon Ranges to Castlemaine, there to crash Jason’s birthday party, which was in full swing as we pulled up a little before 8pm.

There, it sounds like we did all that just on a whim. But no, it was all part of a carefully pre-arranged plan! We’re staying in Castlemaine for 6 nights before heading up to Brisbane for a long weekend, then going further north to Palm Cove near Cairns, where we’ll be staying a further 6 nights.

On our first night here, and despite the rain (which we thought we’d left behind in Melbourne, but had doggedly followed us all the way), we had an al-fresco dinner with around 20 people, which went on long into the night.

The following morning the weather had cleared, and we walked down the road to Tog’s for a spot of breakfast, before collecting some tourist guides from the Castlemaine tourist information centre, and deciding to go out for a drive to Daylesford and Ballarat. Daylesford was pretty busy as it’s a holiday weekend here in Victoria, but we found somewhere to park down by the lake and had a light lunch at the lakeside café there. We then walked around the lake, finding a mysterious native bird…

…and spotting some rosellas in flight, which I was unable to capture on film. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other opportunities!

We then headed down to the Goldfields museum in Ballarat and had a wander around there, learning the history of gold mining in the region and seeing replicas of some of the large nuggets that have been found in this area, including the Welcome Stranger, the largest gold nugget ever found. It’s enormous!

Back to Castlemaine, and Jason and Elissa had a long-standing invitation to a birthday party for one of their staff, so we were parked at The Good Table for dinner whilst they went off down the pub. We had oysters, stuffed zucchini flowers, quail and duck, all cooked beautifully. The chef used to work at Movida, apparently, and the food is presented tapas-style so you can have a bit of everything. Afterwards we walked back up the road and had an early night.

Morning Tea

During the tournament, the bank I work for have been running various competitions for tickets to matches, merchandise etc. In the final week, the Risk department held a competition to host a morning tea. “Morning tea” is a New Zealand tradition and usually consists of sausage rolls, served with the inevitable tomato sauce (never ketchup!) Each team within the department were allocated a pair of countries around whose cuisine their offering was to be themed. We were allotted Scotland and Italy, so prepared a table for each country. Scotland cuisine included a haggis, Irn Bru, shortbread, and a microwaved Mars bar (as we had no deep fat fryer to prepare the Mars bar in the traditional Scottish way).

The Italy table had pasta, pizza, biscotti (made by me) and cupcakes decorated with Italian flags.

It all came together remarkably well, and at the end we were judged the winners of the competition, and were rewarded with the respect and admiration of our peers.

After the judging, we scoffed the lot in pretty short order.

Return Of The Blog

Yes, I’ve been remiss and ignored this blog for too long. Whilst I’ve been away, there’s been a small matter of a sporting competition here in NZ, you may have read about it in the papers. It was the Rugby World Cup, and New Zealand won it. We managed to get to one game in Wellington, watching the Tongans hammer the French. Unfortunately, the French knew that they were pretty well due to qualify in their group anyway, unless Canada managed to pull of an enormous upset and beat the All Blacks by a considerable margin which, needless to say, they didn’t. So the French stumbled on and through on their way to the final, where they were defeated again by the ABs, who marched on to claim their victory.

Victory parades were held in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington. Naturally, we went down to Lambton Quay at lunch time, to watch the team parade past, accompanied by the band of the RNZAF.

Miramar Heights

Saturday was a lovely day, and as they say, you can’t beat Wellington on a good day. We did our chores in the morning (returning costumes from the night before, shopping etc.) then after lunch we drove around the peninsula, stopping at Scorching Bay for a coffee at Scorchorama. There were some folk out on the beach, and even braving the water (with their feet only, it has to be said).

Nicola claims that this is all her own work:

I’m a bit dubious myself.

On the way back home, we took a left turn up a road that we’d passed many a time before, but never driven up. This took us up to the top of Miramar Heights, where there are views all around the peninsula, and also some extremely nice houses! There’s also a prison, which seems to be wasted on the prisoners (unless this is a new “cruel and unusual” punishment, by making the surrounding area so nice).

I tried to repeat my success with the picture that we have in the living room, but the atmospheric conditions weren’t quite up to it:

Medieval Merriment

We were invited to Jim’s 50^th birthday party, held at the Wellington Irish society just off Cambridge Terrace.  Jim is a keen collector of all things medieval, so the party was themed and fancy dress required. We set off to the Costume Cave on Thursday evening before dancing to select our costumes, and with the assistance of the helpful staff, soon came away with a good selection including accessories:

After work on Friday, we headed straight home to change, then got in a cab back into town. Unfortunately we’d both forgotten to go to the cash machine before going out, so we had to ask the driver to take us into Courtenay Place to get some money out, and then walk from there to the venue, attracting some comments along the way – although most of the denizens of Courtenay Place seemed to take it in their stride, and assumed that we were just a sharp-dressed couple!

We arrived to find the entertainment had already started. The Wellington Medieval Guild had been invited to provide jugglers, musicians, singers and dancers, and they proceeded to juggle, make music, sing and dance. After dinner various friends and family members made some speeches, then the dancers attempted to instruct us in the art of medieval dancing. We just about got the hang of it.

Medieval lady with mobile phone

I Beg Your Pardon

I never promised you a rose garden

Gosh, how long since I last blogged! What can I say? we've been boring homebodies for the last couple of weeks.

Last weekend we headed out to the garden centre in Miramar to begin our first foray into the world of gardening – we bought a planter and some herbs. Hopefully these will survive on the mixture of wind, rain and jet fuel fumes available on our balcony! I look forward to them providing sufficient foliage to provide us with good cooking. I’ve only planted what I hope are the hardier types of herbs – I don’t think basil or coriander will survive the outdoor conditions, unfortunately. I’m considering the option of a miniature greenhouse, though…maybe grow some salad fruits as well.

Next week, exciting news about some sporting competition that's going on around here or hereabouts...you may have heard about it on the wireless?

Fush'n'Chups

Those of you on Facebook will have realised this already, but for the rest of you (and I think you know who you are! ;-)), I have started a new blog, which records my search for the perfect fish and chips on this side of the world. I'm also experimenting with using Wordpress rather than Blogger for this - with which I've had a couple of teething problems, so bear with me whilst I learn how it works.

This doesn't mean I'll be abandoning Wellington Boots...this is still my main blog. I expect to update fush'n'chups far less frequently. Man cannot live on fush'n'chups alone!