Our family's life in New Zealand
The day before we moved, this cat knew something was awry. She was very restless, but she did settle down in the rag basket for awhile—I thought it looked like she was trying to shut the world out!
The view from our new living room. This is a frequent sight—rain!
Little Miss has started “feeding” her baby lately.
We enjoyed some gorgeous scenery on our way to Christchurch in late February. There had just been a cyclone, and the tops of some of the mountains had snow on them.
We live less than one kilometer from a rather large river, the Ahaura, which flows into the Grey River just downstream from our town. One Sunday evening, a couple of weeks after we moved here, the children and I walked down to the riverbed after Gayle left for the week. We had fun exploring down there. Here is the track that goes down to the boat launch from the main road.
We cross this one-lane bridge nearly every day, taking Simon to work and bringing him home. It looks fine from this perspective, and is sturdy, but it sure looks rough on top. It’s an old wooden bridge, with some asphalt on top. You can see every plank, and one day when I crossed, one of the planks had popped up. It was down again when I came back through, 20 minutes later. That doesn’t really inspire confidence!
The underside of the bridge.
This goat is staked out near the bridge.
Looking upstream from the bridge.
A lot of willow shrubs grow in the higher parts of the riverbed. I was interested in how the foliage had been swept in one direction by a recent flood.
Many stock trucks and other heavy trucks cross this bridge every day!
This is the railroad bridge just downstream from the car bridge.
This was the end of our walk. We decided not to try to cross this spot! The main river is just to the left.
Notice the silt? There were large drifts of it here and there. The boys had fun slipping and sliding in it—and then they had an excuse to dip in the river before we headed home!
Both bridges, from downstream.
We did something different today. We didn’t have the usual people to worship with this morning, since they are away for the weekend, so we decided to check out a group we heard of in Reefton, a town about 31 minutes drive from us. Because Gayle drives through there on his way back to the other coast for the week for work, we decided to spend the whole day in Reefton and explore some places we were curious about. That way, he didn’t have to drive back here and then go that way again. We figured out a menu for both lunch and tea, and packed everything we needed for a couple of picnics, including a birthday cake for Mr. Imagination, who turned six today. We had to drive the old van, because our in-house mechanic is in the process of fixing a few things on the new van and, due to difficulty obtaining one part, it was undriveable today. We just took it slow and allowed plenty of time, and enjoyed the scenery!
We enjoyed an inspiring service at the little church there, with the eight people who were present, and then brought food inside to add to their shared lunch. We had a delightful hour of fellowship as we got to know them, and then started out to see what Reefton had of interest.
Our first stop was The Bearded Miners, where you can watch a gold-panning demonstration. This man showed us, and a bus-load of tourists, how to tell the difference between fools gold and real gold, and how to find the alluvial gold in river sediments.
Next, we drove a couple of kilometers out of town to Black’s Point, where there is a small historical museum. Mr. Sweetie enjoyed these dredge buckets outside.
I didn’t take any pictures inside, but the man who was volunteering in there today made the eclectic collection of old stuff very interesting. One little tidbit that we gleaned was that, among other gold miners, were a lot of people from the Southern States of the United States. They had lost everything in the Civil War and came here to try to recoup their fortunes—gold was discovered in this area in 1865. We also saw a cash register that was used in this area in the 1800s, which was made in Dayton, Ohio, near where Gayle grew up.
When a tour group arrived at the museum, we went to the end of the road where an old stamping mill is set up. This was the method used to extract gold from quartz rock. I took a video of the machine working; I’ll try to get it up soon. The rock was fed from a hopper into this machine, where a waterwheel turned cogs that made the hammers go up and down. The rock was crushed to a fine sand and when it was fine enough it washed through a screen. The sheet of copper sloping gradually away from the hammers was coated with mercury, and the specks of gold chemically bonded with the mercury, while everything else washed away. Some bits of gold were still bonded to the quartz, however, so there was a mat in the trough just after the copper sheet. Heavy particles got caught there, and every so often that mat would be rinsed off and the stuff caught in it was put in the large metal pot in the next picture. There was mercury in the bottom of that, too. As that pot turned around, a grinder of some sort pulverized the particles that were put in there, and eventually the mercury at the bottom would bond with the gold particles. After several days, they would run water through that until it ran clear, and then harvest the mercury/gold alloy from the bottom, and also scrape the copper sheet clear. Then, they would pack that alloy, which was the consistency of putty, into a cast iron retort and heat it to vaporize and then distill the mercury, so they could reuse it. The gold would be left behind in the retort. This process was used until 1942, when they switched to a system totally different. He said he wouldn’t even try to explain, because it was so complicated.
When we left the stamping mill, we walked around the building and up a trail along this pipe, which used to be used to bring the enormous amounts of water needed to run the mill. Today, they have a plastic pipe buried underneath this one, which is rusted through in many places.
This is one of the largest toadstools I’ve ever seen! That’s a six-year-old’s feet beside it.
The water to run the stamping mill and generate electricity for the lights in the building comes from this creek.
The moss on the trees is unbelievable!
After we walked around a track in Black’s Point, we went back to Reefton. Our birthday boy was quite intrigued by the flowers on this banana tree. There were tiny green bananas, too.
We walked on a track along both sides of the Inangahua River beside Reefton. This town was the first in New Zealand to be lit with electric lights. The track goes past the original power station.
As you can see, it was a rainy afternoon. It was just a drizzle, not a downpour, so we kept going. I took the first of these last two pictures looking downstream from a swingbridge across the Inangahua, then walked on. As I neared the end of the bridge, the sun broke through the clouds and there was a snippet of a rainbow in the river on the upstream side, but it was gone before I got my camera up to take the second picture.
<p>I heard a few good-natured complaints that we don’t get a day off from school, even on Sundays! Everyone enjoyed the day, though, and Mr. Imagination said it was a very good birthday.
We had the (good) surprise of our lives today, and were rather in shock for a couple of hours. Actually, some of us are probably still somewhat in shock over what happened.
We’ve been discussing for a year or more what to do with the engine in our van. It was obviously wearing out, but wasn’t bad enough to replace yet. Then, right after we moved over here, I started having trouble getting it out of fifth gear (it’s a manual). It wasn’t all the time, just sometimes, but we also noticed a strange whine when going the speed limit. I didn’t think much of it, and kept double- or triple-clutching when necessary to shift gears. Then, on Monday this week, I took the van to Simon’s boss to get a warrant of fitness. He told us that fifth gear was going out, but if we only used it when going downhill we should still be able to use the van for awhile. He advised that it wasn’t worth rebuilding the gearbox again (we did three years ago), given the age of the van (a 1994 model) and the state of the engine. The next time I used it was yesterday, Friday. I drove it the six minutes to pick Simon up from work, and both times in that short distance that I tried to shift from fifth gear to fourth it took everything I had to accomplish that—and the second time, I had to actually turn the van off after half a dozen tries, and then keep working at it for awhile. So, I didn’t use fifth on the way home, and the noise produced by driving in fourth, even below the speed limit, was such that conversation was impossible, and I had a headache by the time we got home.
After all that, we decided it was probably time to either never go anywhere as a family until we can take two vehicles, or get a different van. Esther and Simon started looking for them online, and we prayed for direction, but I could tell that Gayle was dreading making a decision. Simon’s boss came by this morning for a few minutes, and Gayle asked his advice about rebuilding the gearbox, since he hadn’t talked personally to him about it. Simon’s boss said he’d think about a vehicle for us. Three or four hours later, he pulled into our driveway in a very nice van, and his wife was right behind him in their vehicle. He handed Gayle the keys. We were absolutely speechless. This is something we never ever, in our wildest dreams, would have imagined happening. All we can do is say thank you, to a wonderfully generous brother in the Lord, and to God Who orchestrates such things. And, I believe we’ll be going to Easter Conference in Timaru again as we had planned on doing before the van started acting up! (Unless the Lord has other plans for us, that is.)
One thing the boys are loving about living here is that there is a good swimming spot just 15 minutes from home, within 10 minutes from Simon’s work. Several times, we have gone to Nelson Creek to go swimming after picking Simon up from work. The family he works for, with whom he lived for six months before we moved here, has gone each time, too, so there are lots of children having lots of fun in the water each time!
The first time we went, there were a lot of people already using the favorite swimming hole, so we went to a bend downstream. Here, Simon is trying to get up into a cave. As you can see in the second picture, he got there, and then Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligence got there, too, although it was difficult.
Looking downstream from where I was sitting.
The boys found a long log, and pulled it upstream so they could float down on it.
The other times we went we were able to be at the other spot. It’s still in the sun in the evening, so it’s warmer. There are also steps dug into the cliff face, so they climb up and then jump into the deep water at the base. The splash when they hit the water is tremendous!
Between the two families there are four inner tubes—or were, until Mr. Diligence overinflated one of ours and then it hit a nail! The boys love tubing from the walking bridge just upstream, down past where we sit watching to the bend just below us.
We are enjoying Saturdays even more than usual right now. Because Gayle is still working at the job he has had for the past 7+ years, he is living on the other side of the island during the week and we only get to see him on the weekends. So, Saturday is a special day with Daddy! Yesterday, he helped the boys get started building shelves for me to store my jars on. Mr. Diligence had finished closing in one end of the garage a few days ago; there was a stud wall there already from someone else’s project. Yesterday, they added the framework for shelving, and last evening the boys got started putting down the bottom shelf. So far, all we’ve bought for the project was four sheets of cheap plywood for the walls; the rest of the timber is recycled, stuff we’ve salvaged here and there.
Here is Mr. Intellectual cutting boards for the shelves.
Mr. Diligence working on the supports.
This is the stack of boxes to unload onto the new shelves.
Meanwhile, Esther and I were working on tomatoes. Gayle brought me four big boxes of overripe tomatoes that had been rotting in someone’s garden over there. We got all this plus a couple of pots of juice from them! I’m planning to save seed from them; they are a heritage variety from South Australia, and this woman has been saving seed from them for many years. The seeds haven’t been sold on the market for over 50 years. Her father used to sell the tomatoes all over the island; he would ship them on the train from Cheviot. While we were working, I threw a bunch of rotten tomatoes into a jar, and then poured them into a bucket when the jar got full. Later, I said something about the tomatoes I had put in a bucket to save seed from. The boy who is in charge of taken garbage out to the chickens got a funny look and admitted that he had taken that bucket out, not knowing what I was doing with them. We immediately went out with a flashlight and found the pile of rotten tomatoes; I was able to salvage about half the seeds. Whew! There will be plenty, unless the bucket gets dumped again. I appreciate diligence—but I need to make sure everyone knows what is going on!
We have spent the week settling into our new home. It’s starting to feel like our own house, now that we have our things in it and have it in order. My goal for this week was to get the house tidy and everything ready for school to start next week, and we have met that goal.
For our first few days, we sat around the living room to eat.
On Monday, we unloaded the container—what a mess as we shoved things into the house to organize later! See the cats? They were thrilled to have their cushions back again!
Wednesday evening I started unpacking and sorting the books. Here I am, surrounded by about 1800 books!
Now the living room is tidy!
The kitchen is small, but well-organized.
The wide hallway is doubling as our library and Mr. Intelligence’s schoolroom.
The girls’ room.
The boys’ room.
Our room. That small room just off it will be the sewing room. It’s just big enough for a small table.
My garden.
The chicken coop that Simon and Mr. Diligence converted into a sleepout. They got it in place yesterday, and plan to start sleeping in it soon. I’m quite dubious about how they and all their stuff will fit in, but we’ll see. They are convinced it will work.
We are buying a house. After eight years of renting, we have finally been able to save enough for a deposit on a house of our own—and that feels good! As I mentioned in a few previous posts, we found a house about six weeks ago that we liked and could afford, and we have finally reached the stage where it’s almost certain that we’ll be getting it. We paid the deposit on it yesterday, and in the next week we’ll sign the final papers. We plan to move in two weeks.
This house is in Ahaura, in the West Coast region. We’ll be about half an hour’s drive inland, so won’t get the torrential rains that the towns right along the coast do. Most of the time, though, there is a lot more rain than here in Canterbury! This year is the exception; they are having a bad drought over there. It’s about 3 hours and 45 minutes from here, so that makes moving rather challenging. We’re thankful for friends who are willing to help us out! I’m planning to make a trip in a few days with the rest of our garden and whatever else we can fit on the load. In a week, we’ll load our shipping container, and two weeks from today we plan to finish the move. So, whatever you see coming through on the blog has already been scheduled—I won’t likely be spending any time here for a little while!
Here are pictures I took of the house when we looked at it in early December. Some of the children stayed home and took care of things while the rest of us went over that time, so I took pictures to let them get a glimpse of it while we were deciding whether to buy it.
This is the door into the laundry and then the kitchen. That’s a lemon tree in the corner, although there isn’t any fruit on it.
The master bedroom. This has an alcove to the right, for a nursery or office.
The closet in the master bedroom.
The view out the door of this bedroom.
There is a big closet/cupboard at each end of the hallway! The hallway is wide enough we can put our bookshelves in there, and do you see the clotheslines? A place to hang laundry on wet days!
Little Miss walked into this room and immediately announced that it was for her and Esther! We do plan to redo the walls soon. Not only are they painted garish shades of pink and purple, the wall covering is an old type that is a fire hazard.
I asked Little Miss which corner the bed should go in. She considered carefully, then announced, “Right here!”
The boys’ room. This needs a coat of paint, too.
The boys love the garage. Gayle stepped it off; he says it is 18 meters long—that’s nearly 60 feet! This carport goes about halfway along it.
The back yard.
Inside the garage.
We need to do some work on the outside of the house, but it’s not bad at all, considering it was built in the 1930s. One thing that was attractive to us was the quarter-acre paddock on the other side of the garage from the house. We’ll put our three sheep in it at first, and a couple of turkeys and a few chickens; next spring we’re hoping to turn part of it into a garden. We’ll be living in town on a half acre, which will be quite different for us country people. We’re hoping to pay off this place in a few years, and then buy something with more land. In the meantime, it will be a comfortable house.
After we visited the gold dredge, we drove to Nelson Creek to explore a bit in an old goldfield. Simon was very happy to drive some of us in his car. He was careful, and never scared his mom! 
To get to the swing bridge, we first went through this tunnel.
If you don’t like walking on bridges that bounce, this one is not for you! Even with noone trying to bounce it, it still did a lot. I crossed it, but I really didn’t like it.
Looking upstream from the bridge—yes, it was drizzly.
I thought it was appropriate that the water was somewhat gold-colored!
After we crossed that little side creek, we started up this trail. I couldn’t possibly capture the scenery here; there were steep banks going up both sides of the trail. We were walking at the bottom of a deep ravine. It was amazing to walk through this area!
When we reached this cave, of course everyone had to explore it. It was a mining tunnel dug by the Chinese gold miners in the late 1800s. A creek runs through the bottom of it, into Nelson Creek. We enjoyed seeing glowworms in the ceiling—but our feet got cold! The water was frigid.
This is Simon, in a part of the tunnel some 20 feet above where Esther and Little Miss were standing in the picture above! He was pointing out the marks left by the mining picks in the ceiling around him. It was very dark, and my flash wouldn’t reach to where he was, so that’s why it’s blurry.
Going back through the ravine. The boys explored another tunnel they found, but some of us stayed on the path.
It lightened up a little as we crossed the bridge again going back to the car!
Simon has been telling us about a gold dredge that he likes to ride a motorbike to in the evenings after work, so we wanted to see it while we were there. It’s across the road and through some paddocks from where he lives, near the banks of the Grey River.
We drove as far as we could, then parked the vehicles and walked the rest of the way. It was drizzling, as it did the entire time we were over there—when it wasn’t pouring! There were a few five-minute times that the sun shone, but then the clouds would close in again.
This is the gold dredge, from a distance.
We crossed this bridge to get to it.
The water weeds were quite interesting under the bridge.
A close-up of the dredge. It is enormous!
Look closely; you can see buckets inside here that are used to dig 10 meters deep. They haven’t run this dredge for several years, but they would dig out gravel and sand, then separate the rocks from the small stuff. The rocks were pushed out the back; you can see a huge pile of them behind the machine. Then, they ran water through the sand and ran it over a series of riffles. The sand ran off, and the heavier gold dust stayed behind. This dredge would move back and forth to dig up all the ground, and it took the water with it—it’s always floating. They would level out the tailings behind it, and then gorse and broom would grow on the rocks. After several years, someone would spray the gorse and broom and the ground would grow grass for animals. We were told that this is the best way to make productive land in the area. Before the dredge went through, the land was swamp, good for nothing except growing sandflies; after, we saw herds of cattle grazing on it.
