A New Continent

I must first say, thanks to everyone in NZ for making our trip there so enjoyable (not that anyone we came into contact with will be reading this) and for anyone who hasn’t seen the Lord Of The Rings trilogy cos “it’s not my thing” then GO AND WATCH THEM just for the scenery.

Our flight across the Pacific was pretty good, nice plane & food and we got to see some movies – Tash watched “The Devil Wears Prada” (good chick flick but without the Hollywood ending) and “An Inconvenient Truth” (worrying), I watched most of “Click” (still not vintage Sandler but better than his recent rubbish) and “A Scanner Darkly” (very cool acted/animated thing). We also had to cope with crossing the International dateline, which meant we landed before we took off?!

My worries of trying to work out what Jamie would look like if he had grown his hair, or had a beard, or was super huge, or was wearing dungarees, were all put to rest when he met us at the airport – he’s still the same old Jamie (although it did take him at least 2 days before an nipple tweaking & arm punching commenced). We then got to experience Jamie’s driving skills before Lilly returned home form work. The rest of the last week and a half has been mostly spent sleeping in, dosing on the net, playing with the cats and watching J&L’s new HUGE plasma tv – Return Of The Jedi looks especially cool.


As any regular readers of J&L’s blog will know we all went to a Halloween party hosted by Lilly’s sister, Angela, and her husband, Phillip. Sorting costumes was cool cos we went to a Thrift SUPERstore – if I’d had the spare cash & luggage space, I could have bought so much stuff! In the end Tash found a Velma from Scooby-Doo influenced knitted dress, this inspired me to track down a Shaggy style t-shirt & cuddly Scoob. Lily found a 70’s trouser suit and Jamie settled on a Cosby jumper. However, Mr. “Grumpy arsed Englishman who doesn’t do Halloween” then whiffled for the next few days about NOT wearing the Cosby jumper. Instead, on the day, and after a bit of rearrangement in the pants area, Jamie decided on Lilly’s old cheerleader uniform, which he was only gonna wear for an hour or so, but ended up in it all night. Most of the cross dressing antics were very amusing, although I’m not sure if my face has recovered from its own cheer-ladyboy crotch dance. We all avoided the karaoke however Jamie & I did pitch in with some excellent harmonies for Bo-Rhap.


As expected there are a huge amount of food outlets everywhere but I’ve decided to save our fast food review until we’ve been to as many different places as possible.

The only other highlights so far have been the ridiculous phone calls to the Greyhound service line. Whilst trying to sort our bus tickets for the north east I got put through 4 operators before being passed on to someone in Canada who only dealt with shipping! I then called to complain about this ineptitude and why such a huge company couldn’t take an international credit card, and I ended up speaking to a guy who was an even less enthusiastic than Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite. I eventually asked (in the most pompous English accent I could, much to the hilarity of Tash & Lilly) “Is my money not good enough”, to which Pedro replied “No”. Greyhound customer service is shit, and only redeemed by the guy with gold teeth at the Hayward ticket booth who managed to help us finally get our tickets.

We also saw a lady get mugged outside the supermarket, who upon resisting said mugging was called a bitch! Oh, how ungrateful she was for not giving up her handbag. We walked the lady to her car and then walked back home even faster.