5 things you wont find in Canada

Hey Everyone, well we've been collecting photo's for the last little while of things that you won't probably ever... (at least not likely) find in Canada. I'll even have to explain some of them as they wont make sense.

Photo #1 is a giant L&P bottle. All you who know a little about Kiwiland will know that this drink is "world famous in New Zealand". Created here and sold by the truckload here...kiwi's are proud of this drink. It's actually quite good, It's been John's replacement for iced tea (he's been missing it) This little man (Photo #2) is a maori carving that is traditional. I just had to... (just be glad it's a photo of his front side and that he's holding that jadestone...)
Photo #3 is of a local natural wonder. These rocks are natural erosion on the wild west coast of the south island. Puna Kaikai (sorry if that's spelled wrong).
Photo #4 This is a one way bridge, common throughout New Zealand on most any road other than the main highway. There are always clear signs showing which side has the right of way however this one really got us as this is a car bridge, one way and the train always has the right of way. Photo #5 - I hope the photo is big enough for you to see that it's a penguin crossing sign and it's for real. I had to get a picture...

Well I'm sure there are many other things that you can find here that you can't find in Canada but those are the best ones we've seen so far.

Merry Christmas Everyone

Well, Christmas has come and gone this year but I just wanted to wish you all a merry Christmas. This has been a different holiday season for John and I, being away from our families and missing out on some of our treasured family traditions (like eating all the ugly jam jams with my mom and having a try at winning the nut prize with John's family) Know that you all were missed as we celebrated but that we did have a wonderful Christmas.

We'd love to hear how your Christmas went so please comment your favorite moment or memory from your holiday this year. For all you anonymous commenters, when you are choosing an identity you can actually click "other" and then type your name (leave the "website") box blank and then instead of being annonymous you will be "mom" or "anna" or whatever... Unless of course you want to continue to be annonymous which is okay with us. :)

We love you!

John's Day at the Beach...

Today we finally had a day to relax. As you know our days have been so hectic with our busy schedule. We are now on the south island. We had a wonderful ferry crossing and are now at a little camp called Bridge Valley Christian Ranch. John met the director and his wife when they came to Qwanoes doing a tour of North American camps and they invited us to come visit them when we were here. We've really enjoyed seeing their camp and spending time with them. They've even extended a job offer to us so you will all have to pray for us that we would have wisdom to know if this is or isn't the next place that God has for us.

Anyways, at the beach today we had lots of fun and here are some pictures to prove it. :) For all of you who are wondering... the wierd photo of John with a stick is John walking like an old man hunchback... heehee (guess who let me do this post all by myself...)

Andrea

On the road again...

...Just can't wait to get on the road again… ( tee hee to anyone who now has a song stuck in their head…) Well it’s the end of day 3 of our North Island trip. We’ve breezed past a lot of really pretty places and if we had longer we would have stopped to enjoy much more of the senic views. Tonight we found a place with high speed internet for $2 NZD per hour (which is fabulous) We can even use our laptop which makes things just that much easier. I’ll try and do a recap of the last few days with photo’s.

So we started out on our journey by leaving Finlay Park (go figure) That was actually kind of sad because we will miss hanging out with Quintin, Dan & Bex (and Beth), Ian & Christine, Joan & Gary, Nicole & Gus (and Mia), Tim and even Jono (although we won’t miss his singing) We didn’t get away until after lunch as we tried to find an insurance company who would insure us (non-native and for less than a year) We made a short stop in Auckland before carrying on to the beautiful beaches that awaited… Our first night we spent at a tiny little Motorcamp (as they call it) that wasn’t actually all that nice but it was a place to stay. We were on the beach of a little inlet, which was nice. Day two we took off from our parking spot and found the road Quintin recommended for some awesome scenic views. As we drove we realized we were going through an area where we had a contact. We thought we would look up Bill & Ann Pearson. We stopped by their lovely souvenir shop and they recommended that we spend the night at a near by beach (Quintin also recommended it). Matauri Bay was lovely and we really enjoyed the view from our van as the campsite was next to deserted and we had a beachfront site all to ourselves Day three (today) we had to make it all the way to Cape Reinga and then as far as we could get in order to keep to our tight timeline. We did a short hike to the top of the hill where the memorial for the rainbow warrior is before leaving the campground. We skipped quite a few things that were beautiful in order to get going. After a fairly long drive on a windy road we were headed north to the tip of New Zealand, the “Far North” as they call it, which just happens to be the warmest part of New Zealand. On the way we half missed a turn, half decided to stop and check out the giant sand dunes. We passed up our opportunity to go sand tobogganing but still went for a hike up the giant hills. John went on further than I did so while I waited for him to come back I got this bright idea that if you can toboggan you can also make a ‘sand’ angel. I can still feel the sand in my mouth…and in my hair, my eyebrows my ear’s, my legs…etc. After that we continued on to the tip which is called Cape Reinga. The view is amazing. From there we drove all the way back down and headed for the Kauri forest. We only got a little ways before it was time to call it a day. We found a backpackers inn at Kohukohu that’s pretty sweet (called the Tree House) and what do you know they have cable internet too!

Anyways that’s a good summary of the last 3 days. It’s time for bed.

Oh one final note… we’ve been having a little bit of car trouble along the way… our horn is sticky and seems to have a mind of it’s own. It went completely ballistic a couple times. I was laughing so hard and John was trying to drive, shift, find a place to pull over and hitting the horn all at the same time. It was really comical, not to mention the looks of those around us as our horn was blaring loudly. If anyone knows where the cable is to disconnect the horn on a 1989 Mitsubishi Delica or if you can read Japanese (as all the labels, stickers, etc are in Japanese) let us know. It may help.

This is the story of a van...

Well folks, we are officially on our way to exploring the unknown world of New Zealand. We finally managed to finish the van today (Tuesday) so Wednesday morning we are taking off. It took us 2 1/2 weeks to get the van in ship shape but now it is beautiful and ready to go. We started with an empty shell of a van and now it is a beautiful converted campervan! Yay! and it looks sweet. Get this I even sewed curtains for it. Crazy hey? Who would have thought. Our friend helped us make 2 awnings (one over the back door when it's open and one over the sliding door) He also helped us make all the upholstery inside the van for the bed cushions, etc. Tonight we stuffed our little van full of all our stuff! It filled up quickly. Yikes. This does mean that we are also leaving our new friends and Quintin behind. It will actually be kind of sad because we made a lot of good friends here (Thank's everyone at Finlay Park). From here until Christmas we don't know when we will be able to get in touch with anyone as we wont have free internet anymore. Know that we love you all! and we are missing you! Enjoy the photo's of what we've been up to the last little while. **For more pictures of the progress on the van and the finished product check out click.**

Testing Photo's

These photo's are just a few we've taken since we've been here. The first one is of the local landscape. This is what most of the country (that we have seen so far) looks like . The next one is of John and Quintin and I when we went lougeing (sp??). The last photo is the view from one of the highways out into the ocean where there are large rocks way out... pretty cool.

Anyways that's all for now, we'll post a photo journal of the progress on our van soon if all goes well. Sorry for the poor quality of the photo's.

Andrea

We got a Van!!!!

Yay! What a relief. We bought a 1989 Mitsubishi Delica last week on Saturday (grey and silver for all you girls who don't really care what it is) . We paid $1800 NZD for it and we think it's a pretty good deal. We had a friend here check things out with the engine and it all seems okay so we just have to trust that it will get us from one end of this country to the other. I'll send photo's by email soon as we're finding it hard to upload anything to our blog when we have to pay for Internet. Now the real work begins. This van isn't converted into a camper so we now have to make it something we can live in for then next little while. Yikes!! Our plan is to take out the back seats, build a raised bed in the back with storage underneath and a bit of a kitchen in the back that you can access from the back door. One friend we've made here used to do upholstery and he's offered to help us make a little awning that would go over the back door so that would be our little eating area most likely. We'll let you know how it really ends up happening because there's bound to be some changes to the plan as we go along. The plan is to set it up real sweet and then sell it again before we leave. God definitely answered our prayers for this little van. It took 3 vans that we thought we were going to buy before we stumbled across this one. It ended up being a Christian family who had been praying that the right people would come along to buy their van. Pretty cool hey? The first one we were going to get the guy was a little shifty. We weren't sure we could trust him and then when John took a mechanic friend up to look at it, when they got their he told them he'd already sold it. The second van was already converted into a camper and was pretty sweet but needed a little tune up because it wouldn't start. Well when they got it to the shop we called them to ask for an honest opinion and found out that the fan belt had gone and fried the engine, woops guess we won't buy that one... Then we looked at a couple others before finding this last one.

I'm excited because now we have something to work on and a goal to get going. On Sunday John and I washed the outside and began the long job of totally cleaning out the inside. It's pretty dirty inside and has a fairly large ding in the sliding door that needs fixing. The first few days we were just cleaning, mostly ripping out the insides of this van and starting new. We found more and more food and dirt and money and all kinds of things the further down we went in the van. Yuck. The family we bought it from had 9 kids so we definitely noticed the dirtiness. Anyways, after we got it all cleaned out we began the long job of putting it all back together. We've had many "Where did this piece come from?" moments already so we know this should be really interesting. Some of the plastic trim on the inside was really banged up and quite dirty/sun-bleached. I decided that we should paint it so we bought some paint on Monday so I could paint them up. It looks pretty sweet now that I'm done. We also bought the lumber on Monday so John started cutting up the pieces to make the bed and interior. Next we need to pick out new material for curtains and new upholstery type material to redo some of the paneling in the back. We're having fun and I can tell already that it will be hard to part with this van when it's all said and done. Oh well.

It's now been just over one week of work on this little van and we have the frame for the bed made and in and we drew up the detailed plans for the rest. Today and next week we should be able to finish and get going mid week. I'm excited to see how this has all come together. It will be fun to see how long it actually takes us. We've had some pretty good ideas (we think) and I'm excited to give them a try and see how good they really are. For example, the bed in the back of the van converts into a couch that about 3 people could sit on and there will be a table in the floor that comes apart when it's not needed. The dilemma was that our bed was then made up of 6 cushions which we thought wouldn't be very comfortable for sleeping on. We decided we would buy a foam topper to go over all the bottom cushions but then how do you work out putting sheets on the bottom??? We decided to make like a pillowcase out of sheets that goes over the topper that will be our bottom sheet. The foam topper and sheets will then roll out of the way quite easily when it's time to make the bed into a couch. :) We shall see how it actually works.

On a more somber side of things, the friend that I spoke of that used to do upholstery, on Monday afternoon had an accident here at the camp. He was spraying for weeds on the quad and was driving slowly along a steep bank looking backwards to see where he was spraying and the grass kind of covered up an area that had sluffed a little. The quad tipped over the bank and threw him down the hill. He looked up to see the quad rolling down towards him but couldn't move out of the way and it landed on him and then continued down the hill, leaving him with a lot of pain. In the end it worked out that he broke 5 little bones in his back that some muscles attach to right above the pelvis. John helped carry him from the bank up the hill on a stretcher while they waited for the ambulance. It really shook everyone up and we were so glad to see him up and about today. Praise God, it could have been so much worse.

Well that's a brief summary of the last week and a bit, sorry it took so long to get this up. I know you've all been dying to know what has happened with us lately.

- Andrea