To Timaru!

Camille is driving and we are just south of Ashburton on our way to Timaru where Camille has a course graduating later today. It's been a somewhat ho-hum journey though landing in Wellington was fairly interesting. Very up and down and a bit of sideways too. I think it was the rockiest landing I have had at Wgtn for over 20 years.

We had just enough time there to grab a quick bite to eat and after walking all around the food outlets giving them the sniff test ("Oh... Not that one! Too greasy"), we settled on a samosa from the indian outlet. While it had an almost pleasant flavour,they were still semi-frozen in the midde and so were returned for re-heating. Back they came and they were still semi-frozen! We had to lump it though as we had to leave for our flight.

Passing through the security always amuses me in Wellington as I have to divest myself of various toys: phone, camera one, camera two, laptop out of the bag, USB drives etc. Today I realised that I had four USB drives in my pocket, all with legitimate uses I hasten to say.

1. DOS bootable drive
2. Linux bootable drive with lots of good utilities
3. drive with lots of files and utilities on it for other stuff
4. drive which gets used in other people's computers and then reformatted under linux before it gets used on any windows computers.

All very necessary!

The flight to Christchurch was pretty uneventful. Here we picked up a rental car. We had booked a Camry sometime ago but when we showed up we were given a bloody Hyundai Sonata and it is NOT a good replacement. Avis drop down the list for rentals for that one!

I had forgotten how boring it is to drive through Canterbury. Flat, straight and relatively slow. It seems to be full of drivers who speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. Fortunately there are lots of passing lanes and I made good use of them when I was driving. During one Camille started repeating "Cop, Cop, Cop" to me and I belatedly realised that I was doing close to 140km/hr whilst passing a long truck. I backed off to 120 and he let me go by without giving chase. What a nice chap.

Canterbury is another place like Hawke's Bay. Full of farmers trying to do farming that is completely unsuited to the area. If you live in a place where you have to use huge irrigation plants to keep your grass growing so you can feed your cows so you can milk them means YOU ARE IN THE WRONG TYPE OF FARMING FOR THE AREA!

Later today we will be going to the Ginger and Garlic restaurant which has a few good reviews on the Dine Out website. I'll try and post something about it later.