Best Summer Ever!

Man, was I lucky with my timing. I had absolutely incredible weather the entire time I was in NZ.

Mike & Brenda's Wedding

I completely loved the wedding. Weather was fantastic, location superb, food yummy and the other guests (particularly the Canadians) were such great value. Admittedly I never quite got work out of my head. That was one of the problems with this being a working vacation. I didn't really relax throughout the entire trip. Just too much work to do. But the few days I took off for the wedding were so enjoyable.

One of the funniest events was the luminescent algae in the water at night. That entertained all of us for a couple of nights! Even stepping on wet sand and rocks would cause the sand to glow green. I'd never seen it before. Nor had a particularly drunk reveller one night who dove in to the water to experiment.. then yelled back to his mates on the wharf about how cool it was. (It was about 2am at this point)

Unfortunately, after the wedding, I had to return to Wellington to crack on with some project work. (I was blessed by the two rainy days of the whole trip, so I wasn't feeling too bad)

While I was in Welly, caught up with Alan Howard (Duck) who is a Project Lead at Trademe. Looks like a fantastic place to work. I was so so tempted. I know I didn't want to leave Wellington. The surf was brilliant and I can really see me living there again.

One of the Canadians at the wedding (Crystal) had her dive ticket and was hoping to get some diving in up north. I'd managed to cane out a fair bit of work so thought a few days of rest would do me good. So the two of us went up to Tutukaka to go diving off Poor Knight's Island. The diving there was awesome.

I did manage to spend a little bit of time during the trip to do things other than work though. Mostly what I got up to was: Swimming (tried to swim in the sea each day) Eating (ate all the food that I'd been missing) Sculpture (managed to get a little creative time in up at Mum's) Catching up with family (even then, I missed more people than I liked)

But all too soon it was time to head home. This time via Brisbane to catch up with my sister Emily, and Dubai to see friends and enjoy the last bit of warmth before hitting the tail-end of a UK-winter.