Thursday, January 21, 2016

Wonderful Wellington

I have been in Wellington, New Zealand, this week at a conference and it has been as fantastically awesome as ever! I went to uni here, and just love it, it is such a cool place with heaps going on. And of course my nostalgic moments for when I was a young and foolish student with nothing much to worry about and all the time in the world to go to bars, or read books, or whatever it was I did for six years.

The conference has kept us fairly busy but I caught up with a couple of old friends tonight, which was lovely, and I've been for some good long walks over old stomping grounds in the evenings. It doesn't get dark until nearly 9 which helps. The conference is the first professional association meeting I've been to with my new job and it has been lovely - a lot of very enthusiastic and knowledgeable people. Parliamentary workers are definitely a breed apart but it is great that they all love their jobs ....

I nearly didn't make it at all - I took a photo out of the plane window coming in to Wellington because it all looked so lovely in the sunshine. I can't seem to put it on the blog, I don't know why. I am using my ipad and I don't fully understand it. Anyway, in this photo you can't see there is a finger of sea fog - sitting right over the runway. Like a thick blanket. We got within 100 ft of landing and pulled up again, banked, and headed off for Auckland about five hundred miles away. Auckland was in absolute chaos because Wellington was closed, and after a complete shambles of organisation (Qantas was HOPELESS) I ended up overnighting in Auckland. They said to be back at the airport at 4 am so our plane could leave at six - and when I got there the plane wasn't leaving until at least midday, possibly later (the fog was still there) so me and two other guys in the queue decided to hire a car and drive. We managed to get the last rental car in the airport, at vast expense, and took off for the eight hour drive down through the middle of New Zealand.

Sounds a bit of a nightmare but it was actually great. There was me, an airconditioning engineer from Wellington who had just spent a few weeks in Europe with his daugher (who is studying art curation in Florence) and a stay-at-home father of three from Adelaide who was on a week's leave pass to go to his mate's wedding in Martinborough and we chatted our way through lovely scenery with stops for coffee to Wellington. Not exactly as planned, but sometimes those are still good days....

2 comments:

  1. why do visions of the movie 'planes, trains, and automobiles' with steve martin and john candy pop into my head? hahaha if you haven't watched that movie before, you need to rent it. it's an oldie but goodie.

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  2. I assumed they were work mates who were going to the same conference! Sounds like a fun road trip - we thought it was probably years since you'd driven that road :-) Glad you managed to catch up with people despite the delays.

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