Well what can I tell ya? We have been trucking along. The weather has been making it a bit tough, have lots of exterior jobs to do and it hasn’t been my friend. A bit of a funny story, the two motorbikes Rowan purchased from Jim next door he has actually ended up buying/ swapping back. Now the proud owners of a very nice Royal Enfield Himalayan.

Jim has now paid us for our tree planting services with two huge loads of firewood. Which took some time to stack and put away. We now are well stocked with wood. I knew my hairdressing skills wouldn’t go to waste. Here I am trimming our rainbow flyscreen that was too long.

This beautiful fern has turned up on our pond. It has nearly covered it in its entirety. Now if it turns red it is endemic water fern called Azolla Rubra. If it stays green it’s an Australian one but is considered to have been here a long time and probably came on its own. It is also known as a mosquito fern. It reduces mosquitoes by 95%. As you can imagine Rowan and I are very happy to have it here.

Our ducks have been rowing up nicely so far this year. Rowan and I are off to Christchurch on Monday to get Camele a fresh WOF and to pick up our German Shepherd, aka Jenna, aka Germie from the airport. Germie travelled around with us when we found her stranded in Picton when we were hiking. She has come back over to visit us. So soon you will have a month work of adventures to read about.

We head to Christchurch early in the week to ensure our camper is all serviced and road legal. She passes her WOF and we have a few great days catching up with Rick and Liz. Before we left home I put off a lot of jobs that I didn’t need to do specifically there at home on the back burner. Which meant one of the days was spent getting Camele ready for her road trip.

We had a great bbq with Jo and Paul one night. Catching up on all the latest. Their son is coming to visit soon. He sails around the world for a living on those big super yachts. Rowan and Jo stayed up until 3am debating the world. Paul went to bed at a reasonable time and I wasn’t far behind.

On the Friday night we stayed with Michael. Michael cooked a great roast meal with most of items being grown in his garden. His place is on a small plot of land but he sure does get a lot out of it. It was good to have a proper catch up with him as normally we don’t get a very long time together.