Nelson

It's good to be home in Lincoln.
I've recently spent longer away from home than I usually do, good stuff up north in Nelson & Picton, but it's still great to be home.

Here's a potted timeline of my trip:

I spent the best part of a day driving over the Alps via Lewis Pass to get to Nelson. Part of my new TSCF remit is to support the fledgling CF group at NMIT (Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology) and liase with churches in terms of teenagers heading off to tertiary studies around the country.
It was great to meet Liam (who used to study at Lincoln several years ago!) and Alex (in Nelson just a few months from Korea) in the cafe and hear their stories and pray with them. CFs in polytechnics are hard work, and very different from their uni counterparts, as I learnt in Christchurch polytech when I was a volunteer with TSCF in the late 90s. So it was great to meet Alex and Liam and also Milo, who's the local Scripture Union high schools worker, who supports the NMIT CF. Milo and I are keen to work on ways to help each other in the future, and it was my privilege, a week later, to take a Bible teaching session (on Hebrews 10 'lettuces' and 1 Cor 12 'the body') at Fuel07 - the regional Scripture Union high school CF leaders weekend camp.

Here's a photo of the new NMIT student accommodation block - looks good, but orange?!


It was really good, as always, to stay with Aunt Maureen in Nelson. I rang her up beforehand to see if i could invite myself to stay with her, and she said 'that's fine Tim, but you ought to know I had a wee heart attack a couple of weeks ago'. Wow - just casually drop that in then! But she's being sensible and seems fine again. Lovely to see her, and the DeHamel cousin clan down the road from her.

The first weekend in June is a long one, thanks to Queen's Birthday, so Liz and I decided to holiday in Golden Bay - over the hill from Nelson. She could have taken the bus which would take two of the three days, so she took the train. Or, as they're called here in NZ, the plane. It's been odd getting to used to planes as train equivalents - but it's great. Cheap, plentiful and quick. So here's Liz (in the brown jacket) arriving into Nelson, turning my 6-7 hour drive into a 1 hour flight. As the crow flies it's 155miles.

We had a great holiday weekend - just the tonic. Had lots of rain one day and lots of sun another which is not bad for winter. I'm sure this is a great view when it's not raining...
And just in case you think i only post picture of Liz, here's one of me:


Wharariki Beach is a beautiful, isolated, stunning, windswept place. Right at the end of Golden Bay, near Farewell Spit, we went there on Aunt Maureen's recommendation. It was great to walk along the beach, and even nicer when we came across some frolicking seals; fun acrobatics and great to see their acrobatic skills outside of the artificial environments of Sea World and the like:


Much rain on the Sunday. We joined Takaka Church of Christ which was a welcoming community, despite the really cold church hall. Interesting sermon on the 'ites' of the Bible - Hivites, Jebusites and Favour-ites.

Then, much to Liz's joy, we stumbled across the Golden Bay annual country music awards.
It was held in the village hall in Pohara - only in NZ would a village hall be built, in the 1970s, just across the road from the beach, with no windows facing the sea!!

Liz would want me to say just how popular the event was - and it was. We only just got a seat. Must have been about 350 people there. But eventually, the desire to be outside in the winter rain was just too much so we left.

It was a great weekend. On the Monday Liz returned to Lincoln and I headed east to the Marlborough Sounds for Minty2 - and that will have to wait for the next blog.
This post has turned into a bit of a travel blog, but that's okay, 'cos it was fun for us to travel and see parts of NZ we'd never been to before. Hope you've enjoyed seeing some photos.