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I spent the weekend in Central Otago. My caravan was nicely parked in the churchyard of St Andrew's Cromwell, a convenient central point for the various things I had to do. I had a meeting in Queenstown and a lunch in Arrowtown to attend on Friday, and a dinner and service in Cromwell to mark the 140th anniversary of St. Andrew's church. I also had an informal meeting in Ophir, which I'll talk about in a minute. The dinner at St. Andrews and the service the next day were a lot of fun. Upper Clutha Parish is in good heart right now, with an exceptionally capable vicar, an exciting project (the Wanaka Community House) well on the way, and a great sense of optimism and growth. The Cromwell congregation is filled with interesting people doing unusual things and boy, do they know how to cook. The little stone church might be deemed an earthquake risk, but it sits as robustly on its footings under the trees as it has done for 1.4 centuries and if it feels threatened it doesn...

I have been using my phone to connect my laptop to the Internet. What with all the blogposts, and putting photos on Facebook and whatnot I used up my monthly data allocation and haven't been connected for a couple of days. Today Benjamin arrived in Clyde with a gadget which allows me, and 9 other people at the same time, apparently, to go online. So here I am again. After the lengthy trip to Smoothwater, the 17km stroll into Cromwell should have been a doddle, and so it would have been if we didn't strike the first foul weather of the Hikoi. We looked at Bonnie and Susie's orchards, olives, nut groves and garden, made our farewells and threw a left at the end of their road. Less than 1 km along SHW6 we met Grant Davis on his way to work at Red Tractor vineyard, which is owned by his son and which we just happened to be passing. He showed us the pinot noir grapes, let us taste a few and showed us how he checks them for ripeness. He gave us a bottle of the finished product...