Clowning Around NZ & Australia: #1 Leaving Home - 3 Month Southern Trip Jan-Mar 2018

Well we’ve had this trip planned for quite a while, even having friends come from England to look after the house. Planning was seriously affected when I broke 3 fingers in my left hand at the Menz Shed on Nov 17th. Here are a few photos to explain and verify exactly how and what I did.
Two of us Menz Shedders were working cutting some netting making sure our fingers were well out of the way ... however that large metal grey bender (photo below) was on the top shelf and vibrated off thereby breaking my fingers.

And an x rated X-ray photo for Ukulele players

The recovery I’m told will take months, if not years for the bones to solidify and get back to normal. However I was unable to ride unicycles, play saxophones, ukeleles or yoga for the first 6 weeks. However now I’m back chipping away at all my passions, pushing the pain barriers to make sure I get all the muscles & tendons back into shape.

We started the trip off unexpectantly with flat batteries and had to call out the Covi Roadside assistance just to get us jump started and away. We motored onto Murchison still not switching off the engine and stopped for a late lunch at Nina Ni’s cafe in Reefton. We also bought some more art from Ruth Vaega, more little screenprinted little round discs of native birds to go up inside the bus.

We stopped in Ahaura to get some eggs, and we got talking to the people for a while. The man's large ramshackle workshop was wide open, looked to be full of character and I immediately stopped to go in and chat to him some more. Brent Foster is his name, he had lived there for 48 years had a business repairing drilling and other farm contracting work with heaps of old machinery lying around. I took photos of his workshop here are a few below.

He has no shortage of bits and pieces...everything has a place and it's already in its place...

....on the floor.

As you can see...big tools for big jobs...both go hand in hand!

Significant Hazards...#5 and #9 are classic.....#10 on the list is a slight understatement!

The man himself Brent Forster, complete with cattle ear tags in his gum boots!

Quite a nice little campground in Ahaura (noted and saved for another trip) which had good reviews in Christine's phone app. We got into Greymouth around 4pm and stocked up with bus supplies, then onto our usual park up at the Cobden Breakwater. The Speedway was on with lots of cars parked, and we thought we would find it hard to park in our best spot, but it was vacant....perfect! After setting up camp and watching the waves for a while I walked down to the Speedway. It had been going for some time and saw a bloke walk out, without having to go through a barrier so I just walked in and took photos for a while.