Martinborough wines, Old Friends and musings on work

A bit of time has passed since the last blog and we put that down on our work schedule. When we are here and short staffed and on for the weekend, work pretty much occupies our time. And for you Northern hemisphere folks, remember our days are quite short in Mid autumn, so no after work bike ride or hike. But to complain about my hours is silly, I see men and women at the fish processing plant work 70 hours a week and the people up at the Mine work tough 7 days on and 7 off schedules. We have it good, though our recent visit to see Duncan, a friend from our freshman dorm at Stanford, raised the work issue as well. And not just because David Beckham

I

is retiring at age 38 but because Duncan has now a nifty lifestyle farm in the Greytown Carterton area north of Wellington with his partner Jan

SO Duncan has now traded his academic hat for a pick and shovel and an infinite number for projects around the farm. And though I am tempted to post a picture of Meatloaf here as that is one of the cows name, the fat Meatloaf's drunken support embarrassed Romney and totally eliminated the 1.3% chance that Nate Silver predicted he had of winning the election, and I do not want to popularize him again to the 4 readers of the blog.
Actually I was thinking of Kurt Vonnegut and Cat's Cradle and the tenet of the fictional religion ( is there a non-fictional one/) Bokononism called Karass.  A karass is a group of people who lack the common socially acknowledged ties like Cheeseheads, Rotarians, meadows club members, Boy Scouts, Boulderites, etc but actually seem to have an undefinable close tie. That's how it felt visit Duncan and Jan, though we have  only visited Duncan now three times in thirty 34 years or so, it was immediately familiar and warm. And that was not just the Wine talking

Though the Pinot Noir at Ata Rangi was excellent. I hope we can get together more often in the next 30 years, though I do not know if retiring to a lifestyle farm is really retiring or not.
And speaking of close friends, our returning flight to Westport was cancelled due to a giant storm that shut down the Wellington airport and Mark and Linda Baxter came to the rescue with  their hospitality and provided us with an excellent dinner, bed to sleep in and great company. All the more reinforcing the Karass tenent.

Queen Charlotte Track, Part One

We have a hard time understanding how holidays work but we certainly are not going to let that disrupt an opportunity to take one. New Zealand Has a couple more national holidays than we do in the states and fortunately they seem to be clustered when we are here. The government also requires 4 weeks of vacation time for employees, considerably more than in the states. Anyways, despite being a much less "religious" country than the states, both Good Friday and Easter Monday are national holidays and we took that four day weekend and ran with it out to the Marlborough Sounds. The Queen Charlotte Track is one of the great walks in New Zealand that has a very important advantage over the others, you can do the multiday walk and have your gear transported by water taxi from one location to the other. That was perfect for us, a 25 kilometer walk is quite enough without a heavy pack on our back. In addition, our lodging is not in a tent but in a charming lodge that is perhaps accessible only by water and can still serve up wonderful accommodations and meals.------------------------------ We began our adventure from Picton, a wonderful small port town on that serves as the southern Island port for the InterIsland Ferry between the North and South Islands. We stayed at a great B and B just above the port where we left early Friday morning on a sea taxi to Motuara Island, one of the predator free islands in New Zealand that serves as a bird refuge. It took decades to eradicate the mammals, mainly possums and stoats, that have devastated the New Zealand bird populations. We did get the chance to see the New Zealand Saddleback, that has recovered from near extinction with only 37 individuals to a population of several thousands now, as well as Little Blue Penguins in their nesting boxes,_______ ______ From Motuara we caught another ferry to Resolution Bay where we began our track. The first day was a beautiful short hike over to Endeavor inlet where we caught yet another water taxi over to Ponga Cove and walked to our destination at Mahana Lodge. Mahana had three other couples doing the track staying at their fabulous retreat. An international group we were, with Americans, New Zealanders, Australians, and a fellow from London. Many walk the track but cycling is equally as popular as the route, though quite hilly, is well maintained and suitable for mountain bikes, with a fair amount of pushing to be expected. We had a wonderful dinner together with great conversation and Marlborough wines. It was quite a pleasure to run into all these new found friends as we all wound are way around the track over the next couple of days.