#167 Nomad Diary. 30 December 2023 - 5 January 2024. Wellington Church. Moving Tawa to New Plymouth. Begin Month Long House Sit at New Plymouth, New Zealand.
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| Tawa Caterpiller |
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| Nice Garden in Tawa Downtown Saturday. 30. Today was cloudy and raining until about 2:30 in the afternoon. At this point in the day the sky cleared to blue and the sun became brilliant. I had washed our sheets and hung them out to dry. I didn’t think the weather would change and the there was a halt in the rain at midmorning when I hung the sheets out to dry. We walked to the grocery with our raincoats, got rained on while we were going to the bakery. Later the sun came out and the laundry dried. We took another evening walk and talked about going to Brazil and possibly Greenland in 2024 and begin to consider Ireland in 2025. Sunday. 31. We went to the 10am worship at Wellington Church of Christ. We recognized many of the people from last week, and there were some people who were back from being out last week. We enjoyed our time together and had invitations. One was for a 4pm worship at a town closer to Tawa where we are staying, and the other invite is to Danny and Mary’s annual BBQ for the church on Monday at 5pm. Danny told me that he came here from Malaysia 30 years ago to visit a friend and stayed. Within a couple of years he began his restaurant and had his family here too. What a great story. He said that the church has had 28 nationalities represented at times, and now it’s about 16. So many people here have remarked how they enjoy this small town city and the good neighborhoods and culture here. After worship and visiting around we walked a couple of blocks to an Italian restaurant called Ombra serving small plates. Peace a woman at the church suggested it to me. The meal was delicious! We drove over to Keith and Elsa’s house for 4pm worship and met with several people there as well as Peace, Aaron and Lingly also came to encourage. We sang hymns together and enjoyed our time of worship together. |
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| Danny's BBQ Meats and Sauces Monday. 1. We went for a long circle walk around our neighborhood. The grocery stores in town are closed. There was a convenience store open, the bakery and another restaurant. We decided to go back to the bakery and get a loaf of sliced seeded bread for the bbq at Danny and Mary’s house at 5pm. While we were there we had lunch. Darrell ordered a steak and jalapeno pie and I had a spinach feta roll. We also got bottled drinks and sat outside at a picnic table. We enjoyed our lingering and long walk with the bright sun. In the afternoon I was managing our laundry on the clothesline. It brings me such pleasure to be outside doing laundry on a sunny day. I have memories of hanging wash with my grandma in Florida when I was about 10 years old, almost 50 years ago. I spend some time reading and following questions and answers on google. I had an idea about looking for a cruise going to Brazil. We had looked into this a couple of times before and our search was not showing us any cruises of interest. This time I got a list of cruises that did interest me. I like to find a cruise at a lower price with some interesting port stops. My finds for some well priced cruises to Brazil and Argentina got Darrell interested to get on the pc and start looking. He came up with some cruises and directions of travel as possibilities. Then there was one particular cruise with a stop in the Falkland Islands and sightseeing in Antarctica that got our attention. We quickly decided that this was the cruise that we really wanted to take. The details are in the Nomad Notes below. We drove 30 minutes and got close to the Wellington airport to go to Danny and Mary’s house. We were in this neighborhood last week while visiting Weta Cave. We arrived with our bread and some garlic vinegar sauce I made. (Sauce ingredients I learned from my Philappina sister-in-law Phoebe: Crushed garlic, vinegar, salt and black pepper). Danny and Mary and two of their adult daughters were busy cooking and preparing and hosting. I spoke with one daughter visiting from Auckland. She is an engineer for a ventilator company and travels worldwide to accomplish her busy schedule Most recently she traveled to Uganda. Darrell met more people than I did. I spent most of my time visiting with a family of 5 children who immigrated from Iraq about 20 years ago. Dad, Mom and 2 daughters in their 20’s. They were so friendly and interesting. English was their 4th language and they learned it when they arrived. He left his house and property that he still owns in Nineveh. The daughter I talked with most is named Dalida and works as a medical receptionist. She was sweet to talk to and we shared our enjoyment of watching cooking shows! Lol. This family has tried to get visas to visit the US 3x and they gave up after spending so much money and getting turned down time after time. Both the Mom and Dad have siblings who live in the US and they have only talked to through video calls. I think it is amazing that we have this technology that connects us! |
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| Canned Fruit Aisle at Grocery in Tawa, New Zealand |
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Canned Fruit in Tawa, New Zealand
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Tuesday. 2. This is our last full day at this lovely house. Jeremy called with Quinn and Andrea. I got to sing my song to Quinn and Jeremy danced him around. Thanks Quinn for your big smiles. Quinn showed us some of his Christmas toys including new cars and plastic dinosaurs. I wrote a thank you note for our hosts, did laundry, cleaned what I could today.
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| Hwy 1 Driving North of Tawa, New Zealand |
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| View of Mt Taranaki Behind Our Airbnb |
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| New Zealand Products We Bought. Wednesday. 3. This morning we cleaned up the house, washed our towels and sheets and hung them on the line. We packed our items from the fridge into our cooler. Darrell loaded the car while I was finishing up inside. We emptied the bins in the kitchen including the food scraps going to the mulch pile up the hill. I washed and shined everything I could especially between the bathroom and the kitchen. We left plenty of dry food and water for Jojo the cat. And we were ready to make our 4 hour drive to New Plymouth. Along our way we stopped for a quick lunch and a restroom break. Our quick lunch was dictated by our limited choice of restaurants that we could find in a small town. I thought there were more choices of open restaurants but google information was not reliable for the town I picked. Oh well! We also stopped along the way for gasoline. We drove to a pre-day meeting with our house sit hosts Irene and Malcolm. They had their RV in their driveway open for packing for their full day drive on Thursday to their vacation spot. Malcolm met us and began to familiarize us with the house, the vegetables and the two cats: Charlie and Lizzy. Irene arrived to the house shortley and we enjoyed some personal visiting while being shown around the house with specifics for care during our month long stay. Irene has worked with this house sit company in the past and had a full packet of information for us to have to refer to. It was all fabulous. After about an hour with them we went on to our airbnb just a few miles from their place. We arrived to a beautiful place with a view of Mt. Taranaki and some chickens out our back windows. We unpacked into the apartment, made our grocery list and went on to dinner. |
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| A Sculpture Along the Beach Path in New Plymouth Thursday. 4. Today I wanted to go out for breakfast. We both tried to find a restaurant that was open before 7am, or even 7am. But we could not find the full mix we were looking for: good coffee and eggs too and bonus of good pastry or bread. This mix isn’t the culture here for an early morning start. So we ate in our airbnb and checked out by 9am and headed to a coffee shop so as not to arrive too early at our house sit. We took a walk along a beach path too. We arrived at the house, unloaded our car and got settled in. 
Friday. 5. We slept well with air conditioning and a door to keep the cats out of our ‘wing’ of the house. A call with our oldest son Eric with Owen and Esther. Enjoying the house and the yard with ‘our’ cows and view of Mt. Taranake. Nomad Notes. Shopping for cruises or airbnb’s and thinking about travel that is ahead of us is a way of our nomad living. We are looking at our annual budget, what we would like to get with possibilities that we may not have thought of before. We coordinate that with how we will travel, where we will stay, at what pace we will move or be still. Consider meeting us on this cruise in 2024. The cruise that we booked is on Princess, November 13-Dec 18. It leaves from Fort Lauderdale and ends in Argentina. We book our cruises through Princess Cruises directly. All of the cruises are listed at www.vacationstogo.com I look at this web site’s listings often to track sailings. It’s also possible to book a ticket with this site. Before booking this cruise Darrell checked the possible cost of a one-way airline ticket from Buenos Aires to Brasilla. That all looked affordable and we decided to book this cruise. We also thought about our possible cruise to Greenland and decided to choose this Antarctica cruise for this year’s itinerary and budget. A Note Update (Jan 14th) on this cruise booking: We've been discussing a possible Christmas cruise 2024 with Jeremy and Andrea in South America. We could possibly move our dates around to have some cruise dates with them! So excited about this! Note to self: I took two pictures at the bbq and they are horrible. Why? Because there are no clear subjects, they are wonky pictures, delete worthy! lol. I wanted pictures of people and I didn’t take pictures. So I have decided to get the pictures of people that I want while I have the opportunity. Having more pictures does not make my experience better. My experience was wonderful as is! I am in the moment with attention to people. With or without pictures from the moment, the moment is in my heart and in my memory. |
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