Spring Break: OXFORD, BLENHEIM (3 weeks in US/UK/US)

from Curt:

We left Bath after another "full English" at the B & B.  It sure doesn't take long to lose interest in the standard English breakfast:  muesli and dry cereal to start, banana, coffee and orange juice while the hot breakfast is cooked consisting of a fried egg, sausage link, ham, fried tomato, fried bread, sautéd mushrooms, baked beans, and toast.  That works really well the first time, but after a few days of the same menu, I'd be better off taking the juice and fruit and skipping the rest.  But of course I'm too cheap to pass up an opportunity to fill the tank and so I ploughed through the calories  - usually sufficient to last a whole day with just an afternoon snack and light grocery meal for dinner.

We headed north toward our next destination of the small village of Woodstock.  Our route took us by Oxford so we wisely opted to leave the car at a park-and-ride on the outskirts of the city, and took a bus into the pedestrian-only city centre.  It was a crisp, sunny autumn day and I was keen to sit on a quiet bench away from the throng so I could enjoy a coffee and read the Sunday newspaper.  Megan headed toward the campus to explore the halls of higher education.  The streets were crawling with tourists so it must have been the weekend before the term begins.  After catching the return bus to the car park, we passed a train station with about five hundred bicycles parked outside.  We also passed a group of about 50 people on motor scooters headed the other way toward the city centre.  These old cities are not car-friendly so alternate means of transportation are the rule rather than the exception.

We resumed our journey to Woodstock and then found our next stop at Gorselands Hall B & B just a few rural kilometres outside of the village.  It was still early afternoon, so we drove to Blenheim Palace, famous as the birthplace of Winston Churchill.  The palace was a gift from the Queen to Churchill's ancestor for winning a decisive battle that saved the day a long time ago.  It seems extravagant for just one battle so it must have been pretty important.  The place is huge.

When we arrived, there was an organised event in progress on the palace grounds.  The event was a bicycle fair with hundreds of families participating in a relay race (complete with coloured team regalia).  Some were even playing bicycle polo.  I say, how very British.  Jolly good show.  We navigated our way through the cordoned course to the palace courtyard and wandered around the vast gardens looking for sketchworthy statues or bridges.  I finally settled on a gate abutment which gave me a perch and a decent perspective of a palace clock tower.  Megan headed off to the Secret Gardens and then went to the Churchill exhibit while I sketched.

After a short rest, tea and biscuits back at the B & B, we drove back to Woodstock for a fine meal at an Italian restaurant which was all very tasty but more food than we needed.  It was one of the few times during the trip that we actually ate at a restaurant.  Fine dining is not high on our priority list for cultural experiences in foreign lands.  We choose to travel light instead.

Christmas letter 2006

As you are unwrapping your gifts on Christmas morning, we will be celebrating our one-year anniversary of immigrating to New Zealand. As expected, it’s been a grand adventure:

We arrived last year on Christmas Day and spent the next month or so finding a place to live, buying cars (for driving on the other side of the road) and appliances (with funny-looking plugs), and job-hunting for Curt.

He quickly got a job as a hydropower engineer, which has been an easy-peasey transition from his work in the hydro industry in Oregon. He's still a dam engineer. He likes it. He visits lots of dam job sites and coordinates things with the dam contractors. Really. He also likes to ride his bike to work every day, as long as he doesn’t get a puncture. He eventually resorted to bullet-proof (Kevlar) tyres. Really.

My first job as an intermediate school teacher turned out to be a major dog’s breakfast (if you can’t imagine what this phrase might mean, you’ll find the definition in the next paragraph). For instance, one day a student got angry and chucked a chair through the window and broke it (the window, not the chair). I was absolutely gob-smacked. Well, that job was making me miserable so now I have a different job as a school librarian at a posh private high school for girls. (On a side note, I never imagined myself surrounded by 1500 females, having lived with 2 brothers, then a husband and 4 sons!) Being a librarian is everything I love - books, organising, bulletin board displays, students who want to read, no grading papers and no report cards. It's a dream job. It was a struggle to leave teaching behind, though, and I may still go back to it someday. For now, I'm loving the freedom and the time that comes with NOT being a teacher, which allows me to explore and enjoy New Zealand more.

Throughout the year, we’ve tried to do some traveling around New Zealand and so far we have seen the national capital building (called the Beehive), giant kauri trees, endangered kiwi birds, stinky sulphur geysers in an active volcano area, Maori cultural performances, museums, concerts, bookstores, oodles of sheep, and tonnes of beaches. We’ve learned about ANZAC Day and Guy Fawkes Day, rugby and cricket (well … not so much about cricket). We’ve eaten pavlova (a dessert) and kumara (a sweet potato). We still manage to muck up the pronunciation of both Kiwi/English and Maori words, but we have figured out that taxes are called rates and the mailman is called a postie. We also know that wop-wops is any remote area out in the middle of nowhere, and a dog’s breakfast means a real mess. Living in a different country on the other side of the world is an exhilarating experience, constantly learning new and exciting things.

In July, we went back to visit the familiar world of Bellingham. My dad had suffered a stroke (plus 3 more since then) and I stayed for 2 weeks. For now, he’s unbelievably frail but still hanging on. My mom is a saint and is (of course) coping extraordinarily well with some assistance from hospice care, and from Austin & Nolan who both live in town and help devotedly. In addition, my brother and his family have recently moved back to Bellingham so for the most part, everything is sussed (taken care of).

While we were in Bellingham, we got to see all 4 boys and loads of old friends, which was nice. Nolan graduates from WWU in March, and he & his girlfriend will be coming to stay with us in New Zealand for 2 months. Carlin graduates from Multnomah Bible College in May and is coming out for a while. Boone started the engineering program at UW in the fall, but may change his plans and come to NZ for a while, too. That’s fine with us; we like having them around. The only one who doesn’t have immediate plans to visit is Austin, who is content in Bellingham with a good job and a long-term girlfriend.

We also bought a house in September (so we’d have room for the boys to visit) and are all moved in. We were in a small rental house before, so it feels good to be more permanently shifted; to finally unpack everything and to get sorted. (Amazingly, nothing in the container was broken when it was shipped across the ocean.) Even better, we have a real address this year so everyone can post Christmas cards to us!

Meanwhile, we found a nice church home and joined the choir and have made heaps of friends. Last weekend was our church’s big Messiah sing-along: two hundred people singing Halleluiah Chorus + soloists from the opera company + a trumpeter = a flash event. It is a little strange here to have all the Christmas music and Christmas sales going on while it's 75º out and everybody's shopping in jandals (flip-flops). But I’m not complaining.

Curt’s company closes down their entire office for 2 weeks at Christmas time, and my school will be closed for summer holiday by then, so we're flying across the ditch to Sydney Australia for a week. Christmas in Sydney will be pretty cool (actually it'll be pretty hot, but you know what I mean), especially the New Year’s Eve fireworks from the Harbour Bridge.

So while you’re toasting each other with champagne on New Year’s Eve, think of us toasting each other with champagne overlooking the Sydney Opera House. Even though we’ll actually be in Australia at the time, we’ll still be toasting our new life in New Zealand. Ultimately, it’s turned out to be a brilliant year. Cheers!

I See Broken Glass

Time for an update on my bicycle commuting adventure. I'll admit that I haven't been as steadfast in my dedication to saving the planet by reducing the demand for fossil fuels. This winter, there were some cold, blustery rainy mornings when I just didn't have the gumption to pedal 14km to work through horizontal sheet rain, and so I drove the car instead. Even though I've wussed out more than a few times, I still manage to ride to work about four days out of five,

One of my frustrations on the bicycle is my propensity for getting flat tyres, or "punctures" as they call them here. I would get a flat tyre about once every couple of weeks. I carry extra inner tubes in my backpack and a hand pump and tools to change tubes, but it still takes at least 20 minutes to change a tube and re-inflate the tyre. Plus my hands get filthy with road grime and bike chain oil. I would have to inflate the punctured inner tube to try to locate the leak so that I could use the relative position from the valve stem to find the glass shard still lodged in the tyre. If I didn't locate the glass shard, then I would risk puncturing the new tube as soon as I re-inflated. I learned this the hard way. Aargh!

I was willing to live with this minor incovenience as long as the frquency of punctures was only once every two or three weeks. I found myself becoming quite paranoid about riding over broken glass. I never used to notice how much broken glass there is on the road before. Believe me, it's everywhere! I guess you don't see it unless it affects your life. Remember that goofy line from the movie, "The Sixth Sense" when Haley Joel Osment whispers to his therapist played by Bruce Willis, "I see dead people." Well I see broken glass, for which I've developed an acute sixth sense. If I passed over a particularly bad patch, I would stop my bike ride and carefully inspect each tyre to try pick out the embeded shards before they could do their dirty deed, those bastards.

I finally had to take drastic measures when I got four punctures in three days, two one Friday evening coming home, front and back tyres. Sheesh. One of my colleagues at work told me that they make tyres using Kevlar reinforcing which is the same material they use in bullet-proof vests. Ha! Just what the doctor ordered. I went to the Bike Barn to see if they had stocked these alleged tyres with the space age technology. Indeed they did; Vittoria Kevlar reinforced tyres using belts of dense nylon thread count, 120 threads per inch or about three or four times more dense than my regular tyres. The salesperson assured me that these would be much better at resisting punctures. At $80 per tyre I hope he's right. Steel belted radial car tyres don't even cost that much, but then they're not bullet-proof either.

I've had the new tyres now for two weeks, and I'm happy to report that I have not yet had another puncture. I'm not nearly as paranoid about broken glass anymore, although the rain still annoys me.

Curt

Petrol, bicycles, and gridlock

The price of petrol rose to $1.709/litre last week. When we moved here four months ago, the price of regular gas was $1.419/litre. That's a 20% increase in four months, or 60% annualised. I'm sure the increases are similar all over the world. For you US readers, $1.709/litre in NZ converts to about $4.08/gallon in US currency and gallons. So quit your whining. You still have cheap fuel. You just don't realise it.

One thing that Aucklanders and Portlanders have in common is that they whinge (that's the word Kiwis use for whine) a lot about rush hour traffic. The motorways (freeways) are clogged with commuters from 6:30AM until about 9:00AM and again from 4:00PM until 7:00PM. Auckland is inconveniently located geographically on a narrow isthmus. Early settlers obviously didn't consider the traffic implications of siting a metropolis on such a difficult piece of real estate for automobile transportation planners. What were they thinking? There are three major motorways that converge in downtown Auckland, and the transportation engineers have created a nightmare of interconnecting ramps, exits, and bypasses at their confluence, which has been affectionately dubbed "Spaghetti Junction."

My commute from our house in the western suburb of Avondale to my work place in the eastern/central suburb of Newmarket is 16 km (10 miles). We chose to rent a house in Avondale because it's a short commute to Te Atatu (about 4 km) where Megan teaches school and she got a job first so I had to deal with the extra travel time when I got a job. It pays to be first.

For the first six weeks of my job, I patiently navigated my way through gridlock traffic. The bumper-to-bumper morning commute takes about 35 minutes by car if there are no crashes (that averages at 27 kph). If the weather is bad, or if sun strike occurs (eastbound traffic can be blinded in the early morning), or if there is a pile up, the commute time stretches out and can take as much as an hour and usually averages about 45 minutes. The evening return commute is worse. It could take as much as 25 minutes just to drive five blocks from my car park to get on the motorway. I can't remember a day when I sat anxiously in gridlock traffic listening to the traffic report on the radio when they didn't say, "Traffic is crawling from Spaghetti Junction to Te Atatu." The last straw occurred when a major accident shut down all but one westbound lane, effectively closing the motorway, sending me along clogged urban arterial streets, taking a full 90 minutes to drive 10 miles, Ugh. I decided to buy a bicycle and ride to work.

I used to ride to work in Bellingham when my commute was about 1.5 miles, there were no hills to speak of, and I was 20 years younger. I stopped bicycling to work after I got clobbered by an inattentive driver who opened his parked AMC Pacer door (the widest doors in the industry) in front of me just in time to clip my front wheel and send me sprawling in front of an oncoming city bus. When we moved to a new house on a hill, and I had to negotiate busy traffic without bike lanes on Lakeway Drive, I prudently decided to drive to work. A few years later, I started my own business, working at home, and my commute was reduced to walking down the stairs in my bathrobe with a cup of coffee.

Twenty years ago, my bicycle was your basic ten-speed with gear shifters mounted on drop ram-style handlebars, and cost about $220. There were no "mountain bikes" and high-end racing bikes were just coming into vogue. How times have changed. When I went shopping for a bike this time, the selections were endless. You can spend up to $6,000 on a high performance bicycle if you are so inclined, which I am not. I finally settled on a Vivente Novara Sport, a commuter bike which is sometimes called a hybrid and which has 24 gears (3 sprockets in front and 8 in rear), upright seating with flat touring-style handlebars and finger controlled shifters, costing $600. It's lightweight and ideal for commuting on Auckland's hilly landscape.

My bicycle commute to work follows the motorway on an adjacent dedicated cycleway for most of the way. I actually travel faster than the cars next to me much of the time, as I smugly whiz past agitated and frustrated drivers. Eventually, the cycleway ends and the last few kilometres are an exercise in survival as I dodge cars on busy city streets with no bike lanes and impatient drivers with impaired attitudes. It takes a little while to get comfortable with the exposure to dangers and to learn safe following distances and when you can sneak through queues of traffic and when you shouldn't. The bike commute takes about 50 minutes (a few minutes less coming home which is slightly downhill overall), which is about what I averaged in the car.

Here are the advantages of riding a bicycle to work: (1) there's one less car on the road. (2) I save about $3.20 per day in fuel cost and about $8.00 for parking. (3) I get daily exercise morning and evening, releasing mood-altering endorphins through my veins instead of corrosive adrenaline. (4) My commute time is consistently 50 minutes and I don't spend any time worrying about the attention span and driving skills of the guy on a cell phone in front of me or a bimbo applying make-up while smoking a cigarette beside me. It's really quite relaxing on the sparsely used cycleway. (5) Fuel costs are headed north and my bicycle has no gas tank. While George W. Bush is trying to protect American interests (read OIL) in the Gulf (did you really think it was about WMD, enhancing national security by fighting terrorism abroad, or replacing a tyrant with a free and democratically elected government? Ha!), the reality is that oil production (not reserves!) is peaking or has peaked and $4/gallon gas today will seem like a distant dream five years from now.

By the way, yesterday I got absolutely drenched in a downpour on my way to work. So what. I didn't melt and my riding clothes and shoes were dry by the time I left work.

Curt