Just Hanging About

It was a long, long afternoon down at Waikanae to continue clearing out Robin’s Mum’s house.  Niece Hannah and her boyfriend were driving up from Wellington with a hire truck to collect a few pieces of furniture and white ware they could use in setting up house.  Three o’clock came and went and we waited, and waited, with texts flying to and fro about the road chaos they were experiencing leaving the city.  All we could do was settle down on the recliner chairs and wait till they arrived.   In fact, we were lucky to have something to sit on, as most of the furniture left home last week.

Relaxing on the recliner chairs while we waited

I think we snoozed off for a while - which could have been caused by all those alcohol fumes!  What alcohol, you may well be wondering?  There was a box of all sorts of bottles of plonk in the garage, which hadn’t been touched for years.  As most of the bottles had been opened at some stage we wondered about the state of the alcohol inside.  Rather than take any risk Robin poured the lot down the laundry tub.  And just as well, some had changed colour over the years, and some smelt foul. 

All this went down the plug-hole

One special bottle showed signs of evaporation, but was too good to dispose of.  Robin’s Dad travelled to Japan at the end of WW11 onboard the HMNZS Achilles and brought back this bottle of of Sake.  (Sake is an alcoholic beverage of Japanese origin that is made from fermented rice, sometimes referred to in English-speaking countries as "rice wine").  He may want to tip out the contents and just keep the bottle for remembrance, perhaps.  But he did find a couple of unopened bottles too – guess where they went!  

  Vintage Sake

It took the rellies almost 5 hours to drive from Wellington to Waikanae in atrocious conditions, in fact we were expecting them to text through to say they had turned back.  But they quickly loaded up the furniture and started the long trip back.   As we were waiting in the house without radio or TV we were unaware just how bad things were on the roads.  It wasn’t till we finally arrived home and turned on the news that we found out the state of things in the Wellington region after the overnight deluge of heavy rain.  Every train line had been cancelled, there had been a massive slip on SH1 between Pukerua Bay and Paekakariki, more slips on the Rimutaka Hill Road, and evacuations from flooded homes in the Kapiti area.  The Eastbourne and Wellington Airport buses were cancelled, and thousands of commuters had been stranded in the city, causing Wellington to grind to a halt. Luckily our trip north to Levin was uneventful, although still very wet, and we thankfully arrived safely home 6 hours after we set off to a very hungry pussy cat.