Packing up the van, and balloons tomorrow

Sun 23 Feb 2025

There was a party group at our campsite last night that disrupted many people's sleep - I guess it was a Saturday night!

Today, the campsite was mostly vacated with lots of green space for us. After a morning run and a big breakfast, we started to pack down the van, as tonight will be our last night.

Tomorrow morning we have a very early start as the weather looks perfect for ballooning! So it will be a tight window before dropping the van off in Christchurch.


We befriended one of our neighbours, Sandy, a fellow noise sufferer last night. She had an amazing story of bringing back to life a caravan that belonged to her parents, that was stolen and re-found, that has been in the family for 43 years! 


Once we knew the balloons were on, we went for a river stroll then jumped in the campervan to do a wild camping night on the grounds of the "Ballooning Canterbury" hangar, ready to wake up at 5:15am.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bon voyage... to us!

Image
Fri 7 Feb (in New Zealand, Thu 6 Feb in UK!) Just said goodbye to mum and dad today (and to Aneel and Deepti via video call last night). Treating ourselves on the outward bound flight! Bert and Ernie are very happy.
Read more

Astonishing hot air balloon experience

Image
Mon 24 Feb 2025 It was definitely worth the wait to take a hot air balloon for astonishing views across the Canterbury region that Christchurch sits in. Every second of this experience was magical. Being thirteen hours ahead of the UK, we were some of the first people in the world (even before those at ground level in Christchurch) to see today's sunrise as the atmospheric mists cleared. It was an intimate trip shared with only Jessica (our other paying guest) and Nick (our pilot). We hope that the pictures of this experience speak for themselves.  Watch this video here for a sense of the serenity, punctuated by the burner. The experience also involved the setting up and taking down of the balloon for flight. Though are at the other side of the world, the balloons are made by Cameron Balloons in our home city of Bristol (shout out to Maggie Cameron)! After this, we handed over the campervan and headed in to stay in a Christchurch apartment for a couple of nights, thus entering a n...
Read more

Campervan time!

Image
Mon 10 Feb 2025 - We have the campervan! Thank you Lawrie Goodwin, for the recommendation of Wendekreisen, from whom we hired our campervan. We now have it and have hit the road. They drive on the left in New Zealand, so after getting used to the van, it's not too taxing. After some supermarket shopping, we got to Waitomo, our first campsite. We cooked up dinner and got settled to the scenery. A little more overcast today, with a spot of rain early afternoon, but still nice and warm.
Read more