We are back from Fiji and back to work. We had a great "holiday" (vacation is only an American word so I was told the other day) in Fiji. We are working on the pictures from our trip and will be posting them very soon, so stay tuned for that.
Auckland missed us while we were gone and both Hudson and PwC almost stopped operating, so both company's were very happy to see us return.
This past weekend was a lazy one at home. Jeremy did manage to fit in a few games of Poker and a round of golf though! Fun traditions like "Poker with the Guys" and "golf on Sunday" make it easier to adjust to life so far from home. Speaking of traditions, this coming weekend we will celebrate our one year anniversary!
To celebrate, we'll be heading to Fiji for an extra long weekend! Sadly our guest book champagne bottles could not make the trip to New Zealand with us so they will have to be used to celebrate anniversaries 3 - 10, but we'll be sure to pick up another bottle for this year's celebration.
We'll post some Fiji pictures as soon as possible!!
I headed back to Auckland from a week out of town down in Hamilton today. Unfortunately it was a very rainy day, which made for a difficult commute.
I got hungry so I stopped at my trusty McDonalds for a visit. I haven't used the VIP sticker since I got it a couple months ago, so I figured it was time to put it into action. Every time I go to McDonalds it's always some type of burger that I'm getting. Down here we have "The Boss", it's a tasty burger with 2 big patties and a bunch of other toppings.
Today I decided to branch out and got a Chicken Parm sandwich (it's on the speciality menu). The VIP deal was a Filet o' Fish for 2 dollars. (pronounced fill-it instead of fill-eh as we pronounce it in the US) I have never had the Filet o' Fish, but I recently heard from Andy that it was a "great" sandwich. So...I decided to give it a try. Let me tell you, I was very impressed with the sandwich. The bun was nice and smooshy, but not soggy, the tartar sauce had just enough flavor and the fish was pretty decent. I've never had any type of fish sandwich before so it's tough for me to rank this one, but I imagine it would be right up there.
After a weeked away, we had one at home. This weekend we had our first dinner guests over. Jacqui and Jerry came over for some yummy food. We had "Grandma's Spaghetti" (a recipe from home) , salad, garlic bread, and chocolate trifle!
The weekend was wrapped up with a Sunday afternoon movie. We saw Transformers, which was GREAT!A weekend out of the city is always a fun adventure down under. Erin, myself, and Jochen (German friend) headed south around 3pm on Friday. We had about a 4 hour drive ahead of us and we wanted to ensure we beat the traffic out of the city, so we got out of work a little early. We played the alphabet game as well as a few other car games to pass the time.
We arrived in National Park and headed to "hire" skis and then hit the bar for some food and drinks. There were about 10 others from my work that were coming down for the weekend as well and they trickled into the bar during the night.
Saturday we headed to ski on an active volcano called Mt. Ruapehu (Whakapapa). It was an amazing sight and not having any trees on the mountain was pretty amazing. The conditions were good in the morning, but after about an hour, the snow started and visibility on the mountain became very bad (about 2 meters if you were lucky). We skied for 1/2 day and then all 2-wheel vehicles had to leave the mountain so we headed back down to where we were staying and headed to the bar. We did get a percentage of our lift ticket costs back, which was pretty good.
Sunday morning was more of the same, and we didn't even attempt to ski. The upper mountain didn't even open until after 10am, and even then, visibility was still pretty poor. On the way home, we stopped for a "coffee break", hit the driving range, and then got some burgers at Burger Wisconsin. We also found out why they are called Hamburgers when there is no Ham in them. (Charlie Nagreen named his creation after the Hamburg ground beef favoured by German immigrants in his hometown of Hortonville.)
So we are back in Auckland now, and we had a great time away, although we were only able to do limited skiing. Check out the pictures from our weekend here.
I had a dinner with one of my engagement teams down here. We went to this place called Ristorante Andrea. It was a neat place where you make your own food and then eat it. We all got Italian names and Jeremy closely translates to Geronimo, so that was me for the night.
We made pizza, Tortellini, Gnocchi, and Tiramisu. I was called upon to be a desert chef and work on a Tiramisu, it was a lot of fun, and tasty as well.
This weekend we are heading out of town for a ski trip, so stay tuned early next week for an update and some pictures.
