This is the End

I think that was Jim Morrison that said that...?

Anyways, Meg has already mentioned that it's all done and dusted. I spent a few hours in at work clearing out a backlog of emails and doing the catch up walk around, now I need to pull my end of the bargain along back here at home and get things up and running again.

No major dramas in Auckland. Never been to NZ before, so it was nice to see it, but Auckland really is just another city and we were not armed with any tourist information. Didn't matter for 2 reasons:

1. The weather sucked... Topical cyclone what's his name that flattened Innisfail (spelling probably wrong) dropped into the north island while we were there.

2. The whole point was to catch up with Meg's sis and bro in law. It was fun to catch up and vegetate over coffee, chai lattes and beer .... and wine ... and a bloody big bowl of mussels... and all the other stuff we ate (including a big snapper landed by our hosts themselves).

Besides veging out I was the lucky recipient of a personal brewery tour of the Auckland Lion Nathan brewery, as arranged by Andy (pulled a few strings he did). It was pretty cool (and hot by the kettles) to see a full scale brewery under full steam, being guided by the big guns. One of the guys was also the "microbrewer" who does little 40 litre batches to test out new hop and yeast varieties... Just a perfect size to bottle up a few to take home after the taste tests one would assume...

So now it's back to reality - something I'm not really fond of at the moment. And managing the aftermath of the insurance claims for lost luggage and robbery. Dang theif made a call on Meg's cell phone for 13 minutes and it came up to 70 bucks. Bastards.

I think we should shift right back into Adelaide sleeping patterns OK, the up at 1pm and in bed after 4am regime seemed to allow us to settle into NZ.

Ummmm.... that's really about all. I'm not going to write much more, but I do plan on sticking up a few photos before I archive this thing as my diary (as I got a bit lazy on that handwritten deal).

Thanks to all those who read and commented, we had stacks of people checking the site... yay!