(The following was written several weeks ago. Since then I have not had sufficient time to organise my photographs so this story is not exactly hot off the press. Hopefully it still makes for an interesting read. )
An old house like ours has a roof made of corrugated iron and when it rains you can hear the raindrops hitting the metal. It's a lovely, soothing and comforting sound which we have not heard for a while. After a long day like today, with almost a thousand kilometres of driving there is nothing quite like rain on the roof to send you off to sleep.
Last night I didn't get much sleep at all. I'd say I got maybe three hours worth and then it was up at 6:00am and on the road by 6:40am. Living rurally as we do we were able to hit open road speed right away and as the morning light seeped into the day we made excellent time with almost no other traffic about. We had not gone far before I realised that I had somehow forgotten to grab the camera! Stimpy, you eedeeot!
Thus my grand master plan to document today's trip was completely disrupted. Getting up that early is usually not such a great idea for a night owl like me. As General Patton said, "a new plan never survives first contact with the enemy" - in this case the enemy was me!
Fortunately (or was it magically?) the rest of the trip went beautifully - just as we had planned!
After about four and a half hours we arrived at our destination and, after the appropriate social niceties, we loaded up the trailer with rolls of carpet and underlay and then wrapped up the load with tarps and strapped it all in. Then we unhitched the loaded trailer and went for a quick drive around Christchurch to catch up briefly with various friends and relations. I say "quick drive" but of course driving about in Christchurch is never quick these days as there is still so much damage to the roads caused by the earthquakes. It is incredibly sad to see how much damage there still is that needs repairing or replacing. Once such a beautiful and tidy city there are now so many fabulous heritage buildings gone that at times it can be quite challenging just to find your way about.
Familiar landmarks are gone and startling new vistas revealed where so many quake damaged buildings have been removed. This creates a strange sense of unreality as so much has changed while so much else remains relatively unchanged. It was quite surreal to drive along our old street to find our poor battered old cottage was the only house still standing along that stretch of the river.
Anyway, after our lightning tour we returned to the trailer, hitched it up and finally got back on the road again. We ran into some very light, misty rain for a short while but soon passed on to finer driving conditions. Dry roads and light traffic made for an easy and pleasant trip.
As we neared home the skies darkened, due to both the setting sun and the arrival of the first cloudy harbingers of cyclone Lusi.
We pulled up in front of our garage and began hastily unloading rolls of carpet from the trailer just as the first raindrops arrived.
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