Snow and sunshine!

Hi everyone,

Hope you've all been enjoying the summer. Snow and sunshine in this update....

We've had a good few weekends away skiing already this winter. The ski season was pretty slow to get going, but there's loads of snow now. Have been really lucky with the weather and the snow conditions and had some fantastic days on the slopes.

Have even had snow down to sea level in Wellington city! Apparently that hadn't happened for forty years or something! Didn't settle at our house, but all the hillier suburbs had loads of snow, schools cancelled e.t.c. - more than the usual 1cm that closes all the roads in the UK! Wellington weather is even more unpredictable than at home though - the week prior to the snow was gorgeous sunshine, warm enough to leave the coats at home, then snow, then yesterday we had a fantastic hail/thunderstorm - hailstones the size of marbles and over 550 lightning strikes in a couple of hours! Nice!

So decided we had to escape the winter at some point, and had 5 days in Fiji at the end of August. Bit of a change arriving to wall to wall sunshine and 30 degrees! Spent most of our time there at a small, family-run "resort" on a small island about 2 hours boat ride off the mainland. All the places to stay are called "resorts", but where we were was just a few thatched roofed chalets (called bures) around a little lawn with palm trees and right on the beach. The whole place only sleeps a maximum of less than 30 people. Was lovely and peaceful, really pretty beaches, good home-cooked fresh fish every day...and over-sized spiders and stick insects!
Apparently they're all friendly spiders out there!









There was some good snorkelling around the reef just off the beach (even Kerry managed to get the hang of it (kind of!), compared to her first, rather useless attempt when we were in Borneo!). Lots of pretty fish and bright blue starfish. Apologies for the lack of underwater photos - Ben's fault (come one, Kerry wasn't good enough to try and take photos!). Ben learnt to spear fish with one of the locals - apparently the most tiring thing ever! He managed to catch one little tiddler - though was actually aiming for the bigger fish in front of it! Needless to say the locals are great at it! They did offer to take you out to a reef much further off shore to snorkel with reef sharks - we didn't manage to do that - and decided that was probably a good thing when we saw the dorsal fin of a shark from the boat on the way back to the main island - it looked far too big to be harmless!


Also walked up the to the highest point on the island one afternoon. Yes - there actually are cliffs and hills on tropical islands! Was a hot and sweaty climb, but great views from the top, and a lovely breeze! The guide who led us up there picked some papayas on the way up for refreshment at the top - just what we needed!

All in all a really good time, very different to our usual on-the-go holidays, but actually really enjoyed doing nothing except read, snorkel and snooze in the sunshine for a few hours at a time. Think 5 days was just the right amount of time though, else we might have started getting a bit twitchy!

So now back in Wellington, though not really back to routine now that the rugby world cup has started. Went down to Dunedin last weekend to watch the England vs Argentina match, and made it back to Welly in time to get to the Wales vs South Africa game here too.
We're trying to get behind the underdogs in the non-England or All Blacks games (we have to support NZ too, we do live here after all!), but was more than a little weird suddenly supporting the Welsh! Was a great, if knackering, weekend though! Have tickets to another 4 group games in Wellington over the next few weeks, so the fun will continue! Have got flags and face paints for all the teams we're supporting, so definitely getting into the swing of things! Even had some props when we were supporting Wales - leeks! Turns out they make very good flagpoles!


























So all's going well here, busy busy and lots of fun! Hope everything's good with everyone back home...come on England! (And NZ else the whole country will be in mourning for weeks!)