Entries Tagged 'Travels' ↓

No Jam-off this year but The Mister was keen to make jam to take back to San Francisco – hopefully they arrive in one piece and we don’t have jammy socks and smalls. Have only had a quick taste and I’m sure it’s the best yet!

2012 – Boysenberry & Raspberry

After breakfast – Supreme beans in my coffee-machine-before-last that now lives with Mother and Father we all went out for a walk/climb up to the trig station. Views up there clear and gorgeous today.

Great to get some more family shots given that it’s pretty rare for me to haul myself all the way up there!

Had a nice day today visiting family between Auckland and Awakeri. Mother and Father came up to Hamilton to pick us up after the Orange Sister and niece picked us up off the train.

It was great to see them

And meet Stella the new puppy – very licky and soft and excited!

Next stop Mount Maunganui where we called in for afternoon tea with Nanna. It’s cool she enjoys my parents’ company and she’s the awesome age of 95!

We’re tourists in our own country riding on the Overlander – the NZ Transenic train that runs from Auckland to Wellington – 12 hours. We’re not going the whole way, just as far as Hamilton seeing as getting from Auckland to Whakatane is ridiculously expensive to travel by one-way rental car or flights. So Orange Sister and niece are picking us up off the train in Hamilton and Mother and Father are driving up to join us for brunch and take us back to Awakeri.

The train feels almost like a 2nd class form of travel. I had these romantic notions of a flash train, nice comfy seats, wifi and electrical outlets – when there was talk of canceling the Overlander service and there was so much fuss because it was a great New Zealand journey, I thought they might’ve spruced it up a bit to make it so. But no, the carriages smell like a musty old railway station, the seats are rock hard (we’re only on them for 2.5 hours (why it takes that long to get from Auckland to Hamilton I don’t know!) so I have no idea how you’d sit on them for 12 hours), there’s no wifi (I’m typing this to post later), nowhere to plug in a laptop and the windows are filthy so photographing out the windows isn’t ideal and literally 2 minutes before we departed the driver was asleep.

We’ve also been treated to some good old Kiwi public announcements while onboard. Some clangers like ‘arks’ one of the staff instead of ‘ask’; commentary about the ‘vocanoes’ that we’ll see on the way; misuse and overuse of the word journey – trying to glam up the rickety ride by referring to journey instead of train which sounded rather odd when we were told that the emergency brake would stop the journey immediately (I take that to mean that when the train stops you have to get off and will no longer reach your destination) and a cringing abundance of the word beautiful, long and drawn out, our beautiful country, the beautiful journey, some beautiful scenery, the beautiful volcanoes vocaones – really justifying the decision to keep the journey running and spending of $68 to get to Hamilton. However, the train is full, everyone is enjoying their $8 wraps or traditional Railways Pies from the cafe and by the conversations a fair few of them seem to be on the full beautiful 12-hour journey to to Wellington. Not sure how much that cost but with the rocketing air fares in New Zealand lately I guess it’s an alternative, beautiful journey. As we pulled into Hamilton and heard about the zoo and gardens and other things to do around New Zealand’s biggest inland city, we heard about the local craft market happening today – “from 6.30am and ends until 2pm”. What?

So, the great unveiling and first outdoor wear of my lady shoes and special dress for the #xerocon gala dinner was last night.

I felt pretty confident and went with no jewels and no fancy hair – just decided to rock the simple. Plus I had enough to concentrate on with balancing and worrying about people seeing down the front of my dress without worrying about fly-away hair and necklaces dangling in my dinner!

The Mister looked very handsome! Here we are arriving for the gala dinner.

Here’s Xero Team USA.

Kara & I reunited in New Zealand!

One of the reasons we’re in New Zealand at the moment is to attend Xero’s 3rd annual NZ partner conference, this year in Auckland. We got off the plane at 4.30am and after a couple of hours sorting out our work visa renewals for our return to the States we headed into meetings, conference set up, a workshop with our solution partners, a staff dinner then the conference and awards gala dinner yesterday.

This year a few Xeroes from outside of New Zealand attended – as well as us and Jamie from San Francisco there were guys from the UK office and some from Australia. This was a highlight for me – like an annual pilgrimage of long-time Xeroes who get to see each other and the rest of the team once a year – I hope it continues.

The conference day and night were full on for me – taking photos and live-tweeting and posting but I did get time to marvel at the size of the crowd – 400 of our partners attended and it was quite humbling to think they’re all there because of our product. I particularly liked meeting people I’d only previously ‘met’ on Twitter and LinkedIn and basked in their great compliments about how I run our Twitter account and my wonderful calm and diplomatic answers to some of the forum sites. One of my fans was even wearing orange shoes. I felt pretty amazing which is just what I needed as the day started out with me feeling like I was useless at my job when someone barked orders at me about what I was supposed to do that day.

The Mister and Sara both had speaking spots.

Kara came over from San Francisco to represent her company at the conference and it was good to see her after 3 days apart!

I hope we get to come back next year, or better yet build up enough partners to have one in the States or the UK that we can attend!

Happy to be reunited with Sara! We went out for breakfast before the 1st day of the Xero conference. In typical Auckland fashion it rained. We walked from where we were staying near the Auckland office and I was very pleased to discover that the cafe was basically only as far as one we often go to when visiting the office, on the main road (College Hill) which is dreadful. However, that was the last week our office was on that side of town so might not need to remember this place in future!

The cafe had quite cool olde worlde NZ decor, especially the big paint-by-numbers NZ scene on the feature wall. The toast was good, although rather a lot of it, and the latte made with Supreme beans was pretty good, perhaps not as rich as I like but WAY better than the place around the corner on the main road.

Queenie’s Lunchroom, 24a Spring Street, Freemans Bay, Auckland

We had a tight timeline our first morning in Auckland after getting off the plane at 4.30am – shower, breakfast, post office, US Consulate. I’d researched a couple of likely coffee places in the central city seeing as that’s where the Consulate was. Espresso Workshop in the new Britomart Centre was our first pick, especially as we also had to report for the train there early Saturday morning and I wanted to see if that was a likely option for avoiding train coffee or a 2.5 hour ride to Hamilton on no coffee at all! (Sadly it didn’t open early enough so we had to have a few sips of warm milk with a slight coffee flavor from Sierra in the railway station before boarding the train).

Breakfast at Espresso Workshop this morning was perfect for our first meal back in New Zealand. Wonderful thick cut white toast and great coffee. I was happy!

Espresso Workshop, Britomart Espresso Bar, 11 Britomart Place, Auckland Central @EspressoWrkshop

This year we didn’t meet up for coffee at 10.20am but no matter because we were IN NEW YORK! So so crazy that when we got married there 6 years ago we had a very serious conversation that we should do whatever we could in our lives to try and get back to New York for our 5th anniversary – who knew that a year on from 5 we’d be on our 5th visit and had lived there for a time. Lovely day exploring, drinking coffee and having dinner with a view over Central Park.

Very cool to get another trip to New York so quickly! Finally got there at a time of the year to see some fall colors, well the tail end of them. Spotted a few yellow or orange trees in Central Park and downtown, hung out drinking coffee (even got to a couple of new places!), had some family time and some nice long hours at the shops – I was in the mood for once!

Thanks so much Cousin Grant for having us to stay again.