World Famous in New Zealand!!!

Well..... in Queenstown anyway!

First in the Southland times on Tuesday morning, the three girls from DeerStalkers:

And then on Thursday, both of us in the Mountain Scene:

Just goes to show that if you dress up in blaze orange camo gear and spend a day selling venison burgers wearing reindeer antlers, you attract attention. Who would have thought?

Another New Toy

We finally picked up our new 4WD yesterday so here are the "before" photos.

Our next step will be to start pulling bits of it off and putting other more expensive bits on! We're starting with a snorkel, mud tyres and tow hooks, along with a 2 inch suspension lift and a few other bits and pieces. We promise to post "after" photos!

And for those of you who aren't as excited as we are about an old 4WD to pull to pieces, here's a pretty sunset!

Christmas 2010

The Jarvis clan came down for Christmas this year and we've just spent a very enjoyable couple of weeks with Ken and Barbara, Blair, Susan, Sean and Nyah. Over the time they were here they spent time jet boating (on the Kawarau Jet), luging, biscuiting behind the boat, tramping up at The Remarkables, playing on new playgrounds, flying kites (somewhat unsuccessfully!), Earnslawing, road tripping and lots more.

We didn't take very many photos but here are a few from our trip up the Gondola.

The first photo shows Uncle Greg and Sean trying to overtake Dad (Blair) and Nyah on the luge. Apparently it was a draw because they won one race each.

Sean and Nyah asked to ride down the gondola with Uncle Greg and Aunty Andrea and we got this photo of the two of them on the way down:

And last but not least, a photo of Sean with his first ever trout.

Twas the month before Christmas...

And all through the house, not a creature was stirring..... well, except for Burton the hairy pink nosed reindeer-cat!

Fishing update

Greg's very pleased as he's just had an email requesting a high resolution copy of the photo of his ugly old brown trout to feature as the "cover fish" for the Wakatipu Angler's club magazine. Apparently no one has been doing very well with the fishing lately, the fish have been "off the bite". Unfortunately they forgot to tell Greg.

More on 4WDing

Neil and Glenys have made a video of the trip from Saturday. It's a pretty big file as it's High Definition video, so probably not recommended if you only have dial up.... or if your data allowance is running low!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux2JC3xjV4I

4WDing and Fishing

We weren't sure what to do this weekend, whether to go hunting or fishing or tramping... or nothing-ing. Then we received a phone call late Friday evening from Greg's friend Rex, who lives about 100m up the road (Greg often goes rabbit shooting with Rex). Rex is 73 and is a mostly retired market gardener who grew up in Invercargill and now lives his life the way Greg would like to.... fishing and hunting and nothing-ing.

Rex was phoning to invite us out 4WDing with the Shotover 4WD club, of which Rex is a member. They go out on "club runs" every few weeks where they head into a different 4WD area near to here, and this week they were heading into the upper Mataura. We weren't sure if we'd know anyone, but we turned up at the meeting point and knew over half the people there, including Neil and Glenys from across the road.

We had a brilliant day, and were passengers in a number of different trucks throughout the day - everyone wanted us to jump in with them so that they could show off their trucks. We're trying hard to not get hooked as it seems to be an expensive hobby... but too late. We're already devising plans to either do up the Bighorn (snorkel, suspension, tow hooks, winch and mud tyres) or sell it and buy something more suitable.

It was more tiring than we thought it would be - we left home at 9:30am and bumped and jiggled our way through the next 10 hours, not getting home again until nearly 8pm, but it was soooo much fun.

The trucks lined up at the top of one of the two ridges we went up:

Stopping for a rest:

The view from the top of the ridge. In the foreground you can see the track we came up, and yes, we started off right down the bottom of the valley!

Cleaning the truck after one of the mud holes... it's much more fun to use fords than hoses.

This morning we awoke to find the lake mirror-flat and decided to not waste it, so we headed out fishing for a few hours. We did pretty well, coming up with 8 fish in under 2 hours. And no, we won't be telling anyone where we went!

Here's a photo of Greg's knarly old brown trout, which we figured to be about 6 pound. Check out the hump on it's head! Just like old snapper, they get bigger and uglier as they get older.