December 2019
Quite a lot to write about this month as December has been a busy month. I’d just launched Defector and Double Cross at the end of November and had started my first go at advertising on Facebook. We started the month in Auckland and spent a day on Waiheke Island. Waiheke is a small island just off the coast of Auckland and this was our first visit as we’d arranged to spend a day with friends at a restaurant on a small vineyard. Needless to say, we had a great time and the food and drink were excellent.
We finished our long weekend in Auckland with a journey on the Northern Explorer. A Trans Scenic journey from Auckland to Wellington. The train journey takes 11 hours.
The leg from Auckland to Hamilton is nothing to write home about. The scenery from Hamilton to just short of the Central Plateau is pretty rural New Zealand with intermittent mobile signal. However, the Raurimu Spiral is pretty amazing as you can see where the train is going to climb to, and through a series of loops and tunnels the train makes a slow climb. Then you get to look down at where you’d been a few minutes earlier and it’s an impressive climb. The journey over the Central Plateau was scenic, though low cloud blocked our view of Ruapehu. We recognized much of this route since we’d driven on roads close to the railway line many times. Some of the gorges into Palmerston North were impressive and the views along the Kapati Coast were lovely. Would I do this journey again…No. As 11 hours on a train is a big ask. Would I take the train to National Park or from Ohakune to Wellington, that I could do again and would highly recommend the journey in either direction.
I had to travel up to Auckland again for just a few hours and this time flew up and back in the same day.
Mid-month we had a road trip from Wellington to Christchurch to pack our daughter’s belongings from the room she rented as she’d finished University and was in the UK for a month. We took the Inter-Islander on the Saturday and came back late Sunday. The drive along the coast was stunning and we were able to see many seals playing in the water and basking on the rocks as we drove.
The work the Government has done to rebuild the road and rail links along the coastal highway between Seddon and Kaikoura is impressive. Hats off to them for the work which was done (and still going on). One thing I do like is that many of the roads in New Zealand aren’t congested and this makes driving a very pleasant experience. Though the high number of bends and relatively slow speed limits (and high number of traffic cops) means you should look at the time it takes to go between locations rather than the distance. As whatever time you think it will take to cover 100km on a main highway in your country will not matter one jot when you drive in New Zealand.
We had Christmas at home and then just after Christmas we headed up to the Central Plateau for a week where we stayed in our Tramping Club Lodge which is mainly used during the ski season and located 1,700m up Mt Ruapehu (an active volcano). However, this year we offered to open the lodge up and make it available for other club members to use. As it turns out we were the only people to stay there, though we did keep bumping into people passing by who were also staying on the mountain. We had some great walks and experienced some amazing views as the scenery is very different in the summer when compared to the winter. There was still snow at the back of the hut, but with the temperature creeping up to 24degrees C, outside the hut (when we had the haze from the Australian bush fires) and it was humid as a result (relatively speaking – our humid will not be your idea of humid).
On the writing front, I was able to complete my first draft of Zero Trust, the third novel in the Andy Flint Thriller Series and wrote out my newsletters for the launch of The Makarov File on 29th February.
While we were at the lodge our daughter had returned from the UK and came to visit us for 2 days with a friend, though they stayed at the road end in a motor home and trekked up the Mountain to see us, before they headed off on their own North Island road trip in the motorhome. That was December 2019 for me. I hope yours was just as much fun.