INTRODUCTION

I've been thinking for a while that it might be fun to earn some money from my scribblings. Yesterday I was browsing through my bookmarked RV Blogs and decided to take a serious look at Nick's Blog. I discovered he is a professional writer with lots of tips so I'm diving in the deep end to see if I can make this work for me.

I'm a bit of a dunce where the internet is concerned and tend to learn as I go. This new Blogger Design set up is new to me so I hope I don't need to tweak it too often to get the effect I want.

I live in New Zealand with my husband, John, in a little holiday cottage known as a bach, rhymes with hatch, in one of our prime holiday areas. How we come to be here is a long and complicated story which may or may not unfold over time. John is a retired Maintenance Engineer and I have always been a stay at home mother and homemaker. Our eldest and youngest sons live in the South Island, our middle son lives in Rotorua and our daughter lives with her grandmother, my mother, who is 95 years old. My mother's home is right on the seashore 20 minutes drive from us.

We are passionate about New Zealand and I hope you will experience some of our delight in the country of our birth. We have also fallen in love with North America. We love Road Tripping and have travelled to many places in New Zealand, never dreaming that one day we might have the means to satisfy our secret desire to go overseas. We live in a lovely country and our exposure to BackPackers renewed our enthusiasm for the beauty of our land so we were happy to cruise around absorbing the atmosphere of different areas. We had a Grand Plan to live Full Time in our bus-home but circumstances have modified that goal for now.

Our current Big Dream is to live in USA for 2 or 3 or 4 years with regular trips home every 6 months to visit with family and renew our eligibility for New Zealand Superannuation, which is our only income. To this end we are on the internet almost everyday reading Full Time RVers Blogs and researching our options. Considering we are both in our 70s this might seem a little crazy but we are late starters and have good health even if we are not as fit as we could be. We don't believe our age is a barrier to fulfilling this dream.

In February 2005 we arrived in USA for my first trip outside N.Z.. We had sold some property on an inflated market and took a portion of the profit to fund this trip. The sale coincided with reading an advertisement for the first Outreach Cruise organised by Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, now Catch The Fire. I had a long time desire to attend Conference in Toronto and this seemed like a great compromise. John has little interest in going to church but he chose his career/trade because he wanted to go to sea. Our major passions were to be satisfied on board the Royal Caribbean ship, Navigator Of The Sea. Thinking this would be our only ever time outside new Zealand we made the most of it. We flew in to San Francisco and began our love affair with USA as we walked the streets, exploring this wonderful city. From there we flew to Miami via an icy Dulles Airport.

Our Cruise was a great experience so with great enthusiasm and not much cash we booked to join the group the following year. Following that first cruise we hired a car in Miami and spent the next seven weeks on the adventure of our lifetime as we drove through 13 or 14 States back to Los Angeles. Since then we have been back twice, the most recent being twelve months ago. You can read about it here.


Today we are cosied up beside our gas heater listening to a mad enthusiast mow his lawns. The outside temperature is about 10'C/50'F and we are cold. This is a very low temperature for us. We had extremely heavy rain yesterday with some flooding in low spots. I can't imagine why anyone would want to mow their lawns when the ground is completely sodden. Roads were closed, yesterday late afternoon, as the streams backed up at high tide. It took my niece nearly 5 hours to get home, normally a 50 minute drive. Twice the Fire Service came to their rescue, ferrying them across the flooded road to alternative transport. Our daughter was not so fortunate and had a very scary drive home on the south side of town. She finally reached a friends home where she stayed for a few hours before the last part of her drive home from work. She was exhausted and emotionally drained after driving through water in her work car which was high enough to wet the inside floor despite it being a 4Wd with good ground clearance. We are all feeling a little cross about the inadequate warnings and signage or the closing roads when they become dangerous. This is a common problem in our area when there is a lot of rain, yet we do not seem to have any planned system of warning. If we, being local and knowing the problems, get caught out, how much worse it is for strangers especially tourists.