Out and about

Benjamin has had a great European tour with The Park; posting a couple of pictures. With a couple of the boys in Turin and a show poster Italia. He's back at the end of the month; Julia joined him for a few shows. The Schwiers do get around!

Though we're getting great exercise on these steep hills, we've rented a car and it was delivered on Wednesday. Rick has been the brave one to drive so far. It's loaded with reminder stickynotes (see pix). We've got an overnight trip to Milford Sound planned for the end of the month. In the meantime, Rick's been given a great little office at the Higher Education Development Centre, similar to the Gwenna Moss Centre at U of S. The people are great and he's going to do a couple of seminars for them on his research. Found a great spot for fush n chups; the Great Wall is a little Chinese takeaway and they wrap it up in newsprint. Had to fight off the seagulls at the Octagon. We went on the Taieri Gorge train trip on Friday, 77 kms all the way to Middlemarch in the Central Otago. A highlight had to be the 'sausage sizzle' at the train station where two guys from the Lions Club cooked sausages like mad for people off the train. The area looks a lot like Scotland, lots of schist rock cliffs, which probably made the settlers feel right at home.

Clip of schist fields from the train:

Some of the tressel bridges built in the late 1800s are pretty spectacular, like the Winatui Viaduct 50 metres over Mullocky Creek. Lots of sheep along the way, and there's an old dog at one point who comes out to meet the train, so Karin was happy. We even enticed Jim out onto the platform between the train cars for awhile for some extreme sport. Chilly back in Dunedin; our favourite little pub in the Green Man Beer brewery and it's got a big open fireplace. Our nice landlords brought us an electric heater, so that's taken the chill off at home. There's a zipline at a nearby park, so Jim's been getting a thrill ride...maybe we'll work him up to a bungy jump!

Clip of Jim on the zip line: