Changing Islands

Sunday was a day for catching up on some of the administration. And no walk. Later on we moved over to the motels and parked up and moved in. Monday morning we took over for three days. Monday was Waitangi Day so was more like a Sunday and a bit quieter. Then it got busier as the week went on. Tuesday the coffee machine blew up (or out) and so we had to turn off the water to the dishwasher. We missed both.

Tuesday I took the car and bikes over to a local auto upholstery place for them to fashion a cover for our bikes. Which we picked up on Wednesday. It is a substantial cover which might need a bit of fine-tuning. We hadn’t realised we’d lose visibility out the back window of the car. Tuesday I also had a guy come round to check out my ailing laptop. It was refusing to communicate with the wider world, via modem or wireless. He spent ages trying to fix it and sort-of gave up in the end. And agreed that the best thing might be to start again. That was scary, clicking on the button to confirm I really did want to delete the entire contents of my entire c: drive. Completely sure and of sound mind and body. And ready for the consequences. Backed up and prepared….. yeah right!

At one point the install process had an error message that said that something had failed. The message went away before I had time to write it down which was even worse. Anyway, the old laptop did boot up and appeared to know that it is a computer. I figured I’d persist and see if it would communicate with the world. And it did. The mobile modem installed and connected. YAAAHHHOOOOOO………. Things were looking up. Now all I have to do is reinstall everything I need again. Jeez, it’s a long list. First anti-virus, the Firefox. Then a zillion Windows updates. It’ll take a long time but so far seems like it was worth it. The old laptop boots like a new thing now – in a few seconds instead of allowing me time for making a cup of tea while waiting. And I’ll take some time to re-think how I store all my photos. And it’s forced me to think more about back-ups and recovery. So it’s been a very useful process so far. And so far, touch wood, it’s going OK.

Our three-days motel-minding was up Wednesday night and yesterday was on-the-road-again day. And the sun came out to farewell us. We zoomed off to Picton – over the Bridge of Death leaving Blenheim. And onto the Bluebridge ferry for a cruise down the sound in the sun. We arrived in Wellington at 5.30pm and were surprised to find that we ended up in different parts of the waterfront, Wyn and the car went one way and me and Suzi truck were directed another way. It took about 20 minutes to get reunited, and we headed out up the motorway to Petone and the club there where we can park up. Except they were busy and the carpark was full so we parked up over the road for tea and Coro Street before moving back in for the night when things got quieter. The wind blew and buffeted us and we remembered that this was how it was the last time when we left the North Island.

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