We hope everyone has had a fabulous xmas and is looking forward to 2012. It’s been a chilled one for us, Barry is on his third day off, and we’ve had his children Jamie and Tom staying. Luckily the sun’s finally decided to come out, we’ve had more than our fair share of wet and cold weather recently – most unusual for Gisborne!
It’s a challenge for us to find something UK waterways related on our blogs during this time when we’re away, but we had a lovely surprise on xmas eve, as a friend of mine from work bought us the xmas card below …
A ‘pop-up’ xmas card – found in a shop in Gisborne would you believe?
The card is sitting on top of my gorgeous new Macbook Air – I adore it, though am still rather clueless as to how to use it completely, so am currently sticking with my old desk top until I feel more confident! It’s fantastic for Skype-ing for my Life Coaching course, and it’ll be an amazing tool once we’re back on the canals as I’ll do a lot of on-line work, so it was my treat to myself.
To pay for it, we’re renting our house out and we’re in the middle of sorting out and cleaning ready for the first group of people to move in for five nights from tomorrow. We have the same people renting this year as last year, caterer’s at Rhythm and Vines, the New Year’s Eve festival here in Gisborne which is in its 9th year and winner of the 2010 Best Festival/Event NZ Tourism Award, is reported to be “the pinnacle of the best festival week offered anywhere in New Zealand.” Our usual population is around 35,000, and there’s 30,000 tickets for R & V – and they’re likely to be sold out – so you can imagine how packed Gisborne becomes at this time of year, along with xmas holiday makers from around new Zealand.
So we’re off to the beach …
Barry putting the tent up – it’s a VERY old one, and we’ll be lucky if it survives the next few weeks intact!
Here’s the tent erected – just a stone’s throw from the beach, and right next to a Pohutakawa tree …
… and check out the view from the front of our temporary home – what could be better?
Tent’s up, it must be time for a drink!
We’ve had a great year, it’s flown by, and so many lovely things have happened. Barry’s shop continues to be extremely popular and I’m almost half way through my Life Coaching Diploma, we have a gorgeous new grandson who we see regularly on Skype, and our family on both sides of the world are healthy.
So it’s happy 2012 to all of our readers, and we hope to catch up with some of you when we’re back in March. Have a fun, but safe, New Year, and may you reach for the stars and achieve some of your dreams next year. We’ll have a lot to do on our journey back to the waterways of UK by February 2013, so it’ll be a productive time, and I also want to see as much as I can of the Southern Hemisphere before we return to my homeland, so it’s very exciting!
Arohanui (big love) from Sandra & Barry.
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