Category: Places

Kickin’ it Old School

May 15, 2021 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

I finally finished the second draft of my second novel (which currently has the working title of Staking a Claim) earlier in April, during the NZ school holidays. We were on a family vacation in the Hawke’s Bay at the time and so celebrated this milestone by going out to the Taradale RSA (Returned and Services’ Association) for roast beef and gravy. It may not have been the most prestigious of venues but it did have the advantage of serving cheap drinks and being located right next door to the motel we were staying in — it doesn’t pay to be sober or have far to walk home when going to dinner in an unfamiliar town with three hyper-stimulated and squabbling children in tow.

I’m not quite sure what sins my wife and I committed in a past life to deserve it, but I swear that every time we go out for a meal with our children one or the other of them will spill their drink all over the table. Sure enough, it happened again at the Taradale RSA. To be fair to the child responsible, we had (mostly) finished eating by then but, with liquid waterfalling over the sides of the table and into our laps, we took that as the cue to return to our motel unit, where the drinks were even cheaper.

Now that the celebration is over, it’s back to the hard slog of writing. I’m currently in the process of reading through my story chapter by chapter and making notes of things that need tweaking or clarifying for the next draft. I need to find the answers to such pressing questions as ‘how much did it cost to build a four bedroom, two bathroom house in Cromwell in the year 2000’ and, ‘does a 2003 Hyundai Santa Fe have keyless entry?’ Unfortunately, historical research is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when I think of ‘activities that get me excited and make me wish I could spend every waking hour participating in them’. Since I’m writing humorous fiction, a certain amount of implausibility is necessary to serve the story, but there’s a balance to be found between the improbable and the impossible that’s easy to get wrong if you’re not careful. There’s always that one person so obsessed by plotholes and anachronisms in their literary fare that they’ll write a letter to point out that the cylinder on a Smith & Wesson revolver actually spins counter-clockwise, not clockwise.

Speaking of historical research, one of the most fun things I did with the children in the school holidays was take them to an open day at the Whangarei Museum, Kiwi House and Heritage Park. They loved the kiwis (who wouldn’t), but were even more taken with the old school building on site; it was set up so they could dress in old-fashioned clothes and sit at the old wooden desks drawing on chalk slates and practicing their cursive handwriting with a fountain pen and ink. Of course, the same child that spilt water all over our dinner while on vacation knocked his inkwell all over the floor of the schoolhouse, but the demonstrator didn’t seem particularly bothered by it. “It washes out,” she reckoned. “Maybe not the first time, but, you know, eventually.” Anyway, it was very cute and the kids loved kickin’ it old school and want to go back and do it all over again.

Kickin' it Old School — “Wasn’t us, Miss, honest — we’d never put no pins on your chair. We was jus’ sittin’ here practicin’ our letters the whole time.”

I just wish they could get that excited about going to school on a normal day.

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Winter Flooding in Northland

August 9, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

After the meteorological highlights of my July post, this post also features a precipitous weather event, although the precipitation in question is of the wet rather than frozen kind.

On July 17th 2020, Northland experienced a ‘one-in-five-hundred-year’ rainstorm. I have no idea how the meteorologists can determine the veracity of such claims, but there was no question an enormous amount of water fell out of the sky overnight. Winter flooding in Northland is not uncommon, and while there have been several floods in the eight years we’ve lived in our current location, this one was the most impressive and widespread by far. Roads became rivers; valleys became lakes, and for 36 hours afterwards we were stuck at home because the roads in every direction were impassable.

Winter Flooding in Northland July 2020 — Anyone for swimming?

The floor of our garage/shed-where-we-store-all-our-junk was flooded and the garden was a lot soggier than usual but other than that we came through it unscathed.

Others weren’t so lucky.

I suspect that with climate change progressing at current rates over the next couple of decades, ‘once-in-five-hundred-years’ is going to start looking like awfully wishful thinking.

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Fun Family Adventures

July 14, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

(or Small Towns and Giant Sculptures redux)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that the best thing about being a teacher is the school holidays. Last week, my wife and I took the kids on a 500 kilometre journey to the central North Island plateau for a fun family adventure, where we spent a few days in the small town of Ohakune (it’s important to note that the ‘fun’ part of the adventure didn’t include the eight hours stuck in a car with three children).

In many ways, Ohakune is a typical small New Zealand town. It has the requisite giant sculpture, a carrot in this instance (apparently Ohakune is the carrot growing capital of New Zealand, evidenced by the fact that there were enormous bags of carrots for sale outside almost every other shopfront. I’m not sure who the target market for such quantities of carrots is — perhaps commercial rabbit breeders or people whose entire extended families suffer from carrot addictions). It also has the requisite grand town slogan: ‘Where Adventures Begin’.

Fun Family Adventures with Giant Carrot, Ohakune, NZ — *Of course we’re excited; it’s a giant **carrot,** for goodness sake!*

Fun Family Adventures, Ohakune, NZ — *This one’s self-explanatory.*

While the very nature of small town slogans tends towards hyperbole, this seemed to me to be a potentially egregious example. After all, when I think of the word ‘adventure’, the picture that comes into my head is not that of a small town in the middle of nowhere. However, the particular middle of nowhere that Ohakune happens to be located in is the southern slopes of Mt Ruapehu, on the edge of the Tongariro National Park. In terms of adventures, there’s plenty on offer — biking, climbing, hiking, and in the winter, skiing — which was the main purpose of our trip. I’m still not sure what the relationship between ‘carrots’ and ‘adventure’ is, but perhaps I’m just not using my imagination.

On our second day in town we hit the slopes. Due to the uncertainty created by Covid-19, Turoa, the ski-field closest to Ohakune, was closed at the time of our visit, so we caught a bus to Whakapapa, the ski-field on the northern slopes of the mountain. It was the first time any of the kids had been to the mountains, the first time they’d ever worn thermal underwear, and for the entire bus ride they all complained about how hot and uncomfortable they were. This all changed when we got off the bus. Within seconds, all three kids were bawling and saying they wanted to go home because they were freezing. It was one of those moments that’s funny in retrospect but at the time, not so much. To be fair, the weather in the central North Island plateau is notoriously changeable and the conditions on the day were unpleasant, to say the least — snowing, icy cold and blowing a gale.

They weren’t the only tears of the day. As well as the vagaries of the weather, those of you who have hired ski-gear before will likely know that there are few things in life more uncomfortable than a rented ski-boot. However, in between the tears and tantrums (and not just from the children), everyone gave it their best shot. Since my wife and children were complete skiing novices and only the beginner slopes of Whakapapa were open, I had decided not to ski. Instead, I spent the day running back and forth between them, pushing them up and pointing them down the slope and offering (mostly ignored) advice. After a couple of hours the kids had had enough and proceeded to entertain themselves by making snow angels, snowmen and snowballs, which they subsequently threw at me as payment for my coaching efforts. My wife persevered for a little longer but then she too called it quits. I don’t blame her — it’s amazing how much pain a snowflake can cause when its propelled into your face by a gusting 80 km/h wind.

Fun Family Adventures with skis, Whakapapa, NZ. — *I am trying to smile; it’s just that my feet really hurt.*

Strangely enough, nobody wanted to repeat the experience the following day. So we spent it relaxing at our chalet — eating chocolate, reading books, watching TV, eating chocolate. It was late afternoon and I was lying on the couch with the curtains closed, reading a book and eating chocolate when my wife walks in the room and says “It’s snowing”. I thought she was kidding at first — Ohakune is only 600 metres above sea level and it’s not often that snow falls right down in town, but sure enough, when I opened the curtains the evidence was undeniable. It continued falling throughout the afternoon and into the night and when we woke up early on our final morning in town we were greeted with this.

Fun Family Adventures with Giant Carrot in the snow, Ohakune, NZ. — *They say that when the moon is aligned with a giant carrot, good fortune is nigh*.

It was magical stuff. A dusting of snow makes anything look like it’s come straight out of a fairy tale, let alone a giant carrot. The kids couldn’t wait to make snowballs and throw them at me and I finally discovered what all those carrots were for.

It was the perfect ending to our fun family adventure.

What’s your favourite location for fun family adventures? Let me know in the comments.

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Waiting for the Rain

March 12, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

It’s been an especially hot, dry summer here in our wee corner of Northland, with no real rain since late in 2019. The vegetable garden, aside from a few lonely, overripe tomatoes drooping from a couple of withered stems, is essentially dead, and the leaves on the azaleas have turned a mottled shade of brown that I’ve never seen in the seven years we’ve lived here.

Waiting for the Rain: Tangihua Range, Northland, NZ — There’s brown in them thar hills.

We live in the country, so the only domestic water supply we have available is the stuff that’s fallen out of the sky onto our roof. As a result, my favourite pastime over the past few weeks has been climbing on top of the water tank to inspect the water level inside.

It costs approximately $450 to get half a tank load of water delivered from town on the back of a truck, and my wife and I see it as a matter of personal pride that we not allow this to happen. So, we’ve implemented rigorous water conservation measures. These include, in no particular order: washing our clothes and our children at the in-laws house in town; a strict if it’s yellow let it mellow policy with the toilet (and then when it becomes necessary to flush the brown down, bucketing water from the small tank that is fed from the garage roof to fill the cistern); and ceasing to clean our cars (this was easy for me since I never washed mine in the first place).

I’ve even taken to showering at work, which is no small sacrifice, as the men’s bathroom there is a strange and disconcerting place. Although it received a new paint job a couple of years ago (a particularly unsettling shade of baby blue), the ledge above the shower stall is a graveyard of empty bottles of shampoo and conditioner which have potentially been there for decades.

The door to the stall is hinged in such a way that you have to contort your body just to get inside it (or maybe I’m just fat), and there’s only one single hook for hanging your clothes and towel on. Leaving them on a pile on the floor isn’t an option, because the doorway into the shower is screened by a mouldy plastic curtain which doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to, so by the end of your shower there’s an inch of water pooling on the floor outside the cubicle.

Things don’t get any better once you’re in the cubicle itself. I’m six-foot-four (or at least that’s what I tell people), and the ancient shower rose is conveniently located at a height just north of my navel. Even so, there’s always at least one half-blocked jet that shoots upwards at just the right angle to hit me in the eye. Furthermore, for some reason there’s rarely any hot water, and even when there is, it has a nasty habit of disappearing at the most inconvenient times (I’ll spare you the details).

To be fair, there has been a smidgeon of the wet stuff falling from the heavens in the last week or two, but while our friends who live five kilometres down the road have been plastering pictures of the downpours at their house all over Facebook, all we’ve had at ours is the occasional short-lived, misty kiss, as though we’ve strayed too close to someone with the habit of ‘spraying it’ rather than ‘saying it’. So far, no amount of naked shamanic rain dancing has convinced the sky to perform otherwise, and it remains touch and go as to whether we’ll have to forfeit that 450 bucks for a tanker delivery.

Hopefully, the heavens will open up soon and we can go back to washing ourselves, our children and our clothes in the comfort of our own home. I suppose the one good thing about waiting for the rain is that we learn not to take such a precious resource for granted.

Do you have any handy tips on saving water? Let me know in the comments.

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The Fine Line between Fun and Fear

January 14, 2020 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

Rainbow's End, Auckland, NZ — Indigo and Violet were upset when they discovered they weren’t invited to the party.

It’s the school holidays here in NZ and keeping the kids entertained through the slow, sweaty, summer days can be a real challenge. So as a special treat, this last weekend we took them to Rainbow’s End, a theme park in South Auckland.

They had a great time, and two out of the three of them proved to be real adrenaline junkies. For myself, overall, it was a fun day, although when broken into smaller chunks, it was more like pockets of fun interspersed with long stretches of tedium (the inescapable queues), dotted with two or three paralysing moments of sheer terror.

One of these awful moments occurred while hanging upside down at the apex of the loop on the roller coaster, where I was struck by the sudden thought that if the engineering failed and our cart came tumbling out of the sky, the inevitable result would be a battered and bloody death for everyone involved.

At the end of the ride, my daughter, smiling from ear to ear, asked me if I’d like to go again. I wiped a dribble of vomit from my lips and suggested that she spread the joy by asking her mother instead.

After completing two more circuits, my wife and daughter then recommended I finish the day with this little number, the Fearfall.

The Fine Line between Fun and Fear: The Fearfall, Rainbow's End, NZ — Lucky I bought a spare pair of undies.

Despite still feeling slightly nauseous following my turn on the rollercoaster, I was up for it. I’ve been bungy jumping and skydiving before and I thought it couldn’t be any worse than that. The Fearfall rises 18 stories into the South-Auckland sky. I don’t know why they don’t provide a useful metric measurement for its height, but in the final few seconds of our ascent all I could think was, S#*t this is high. This was immediately followed by Oh, God, this is going to be bad.

And it was. Pants-wettingly terrifying, to be frank. In some ways, the worst part was the few seconds stopped at the top, prior to the drop, where you realise you’re well past the point of no return and have the time to contemplate how absurdly horrible the coming moment is going to be, without ever knowing exactly when that moment is going to begin.

It was just the same when I went tandem skydiving in Queenstown many years ago. The same feeling of utter helplessness that comes with being strapped to some stranger’s front, blasted by the wind screaming through the open doorway of a plane 10,000 feet in the air, with no control over what’s going to happen next.

The abject terror of the fall was the same too. Time slowed down and, too scared to scream, my stomach rose up into my throat and I thought I was going to die. Then, only a moment later… it was all over and I was on the ground again.

Despite the awful, incapacitating horror of it all I actually giggled at the operator and thanked him upon exiting. The words came out before my brain could stop them. I suppose I was happy not to be dead after all but still, it seemed so incongruous. It’s a fine line between fun and fear.

Trudging back to the car with three exhausted but exhilarated children, I felt the day was another reminder (along with grey hair and varicose veins), that I’m not as young as I used to be. These days, when it comes to being entertained, I’d rather read a book.

When was the last time you paid good money to get scared out of your skin? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments below.

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Small Towns in New Zealand

November 16, 2019 / J.B. Reynolds / 0 Comments

My new novel, Taking the Plunge, is set mostly in the small town of Cromwell, in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. The main reason I chose to set it in Cromwell is because I lived there for a couple of years in the early 2000’s, commuting to work in Queenstown, and the impression it left on me has been a lasting one.

Cromwell is fairly typical of small towns in New Zealand. Sleepy and serene (some might say dull), it’s surrounded by mountains and perches on the edge of a man-made lake that was the result of damming the Clutha River for a hydro-electric power station in the 80’s. Historically, it was a gold mining town (parts of which now lie beneath the waters of the lake), but these days it’s better known for its vineyards, apricot and cherry orchards, and for being the place you pass by on the way between the popular alpine resort towns of Queenstown and Wanaka.

As if real fruit weren’t enough, Cromwell also has the notable attraction of the fake variety, on a giant scale. Just beside the highway turnoff, imploring visitors to stop and take in all the town has to offer, is this:

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Fruit Sculpture, Cromwell — *“That lady should really put some pants on.”*

Cromwell isn’t the only small town in NZ to have a giant sculpture as a local landmark. Gore, for instance, has a giant fish;

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Fish Sculpture, Gore — *“Eeew, someone laid a big brown trout!*“

Ohakune, a giant carrot;

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Carrot Sculpture, Ohakune — *“It’s the carotene that helps you ski faster.”*

*Image by Tony from Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).*

And Taihape, a giant gumboot.

Small Towns in New Zealand: Giant Gumboot Sculpture, Taihape — *“Hold on, I’m sure I left my keys here somewhere.”*

*Image by DaxMairead from Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).*

These sculptures play their part in helping put these towns on the map, and if nothing else, they make for great photo-ops.

Along with its giant fruit sculpture, Cromwell, like most small towns, also has some interesting street names. When I was living there one in particular always stood out to me—Neplusultra. Off Barry Ave, and running parallel to Clare, Wicklow, and Kirtle, Neplusultra’s Latin heritage stands out. I had to consult a dictionary to discover that it means no more beyond, which I guess makes sense because running down one side of the street is a golf course, so there are no more houses beyond that side of the street.

Anyway, if you’re wondering where I’m going with this, here it is. Neplusultra Street and the giant fruit sculpture were the inspiration for a limerick I composed whilst living in Cromwell:

There was a young man from Cromwell,
Whose landlord was giving him hell.
He moved from Neplusultra
To the giant fruit sculpture,
And there he did happily dwell.

If you know of any other small towns in New Zealand or elsewhere with giant sculptures or interesting street names, I’d love to hear about them. And if you have a favourite limerick or two then I’d love to hear them too. Let me know in the comments.

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Category: Places

Kickin’ it Old School

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Winter Flooding in Northland

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Fun Family Adventures

(or Small Towns and Giant Sculptures redux)

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Waiting for the Rain

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The Fine Line between Fun and Fear

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Small Towns in New Zealand

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