s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

It seems like I did very little today, for it to have been such a long, tiring day. I dropped Chris and Nick off in Kelson (not as easy as it sounds, considering the place I was dropping them off at was up a narrow, nearly vertical drive, with not much in the way of places to turn around) so they could get a ride into Newtown for the annual Kendo business meeting, went to an open house in Kelson, went to another open house in Makara, and then drove into Newtown to pick up Chris and Nick and take us all home again. I guess it was tiring just because there was *so* much driving, much of it on twisty little roads that really didn’t feel wide enough for Chris’ big sedan.

The place in Kelson was nice. Fairly elevated (I’m coming to learn that being higher up means you get more sun than the folks down in the valleys, although it usually also means more wind), with a couple of paddocks, a view all the way down to the harbor, and a border on some conservation land that one might perhaps be able to walk or ride through. The ad implied that you could do just that, but there was actually a fairly steep gully between you and it, and I didn’t see anything that looked like a path, so I’m not sure how practical that assertion really was. Still, it looked like a decent house, with decent sized rooms and lovely wooden floors.

It was all of five minutes from the highway, which is good, but I’m not sure if there is anything like a “village” or shops or anything in Kelson, or if you have to drive into Lower Hutt to get your liter of milk. Something to investigate.

From Kelson, I took the motorway into Wellington, then wended my way up and through to Karori, and from thence to Makara. I’m still not sure whether I would eventually get used to the twisty mountainous stretch of road between Karori and Makara, or if it would eventually make me crazy. Difficult to say. It certainly feels much longer than the ~10 minutes it actually is. I suspect that unless the one little… I guess you could call it a “service station” — I think it worked on cars, but it didn’t sell gas — that was also advertising “crafts”… anyway, unless it also sells milk, you’ll be taking that twisty road out of the valley for your liter of milk (or getting some from your neighbor’s cow ?), so, hmm. It was a pretty little farmlet I looked at, though, built by a couple who’d moved down from Auckland 30 years prior. They’d lived in the c.1850 farmhouse while they’d had the adjacent Lockwood house built for them (that’s the old farmhouse in the foreground of the first photo below). 1850 doesn’t sound very old (certainly not for anyone who’s been living in New England, where the hamlets proudly announce their 17th century foundation dates when you drive in, oh, and the Lions Clubs meets every third Wednesday) until you realize that the City of Wellington was only made a city in 1842 (the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between the British and the Maori in 1840).

Anyway, this Lockwood house may well have been built on the same plan as the one Chris and I visited up in Whiteman’s Valley — it certainly has the same tiny bedrooms. The living areas were fairly sized, though, and the indoor pool (with spa and sauna) they added, all under glass, is just *begging* to be made into a lush green conservatory, or possibly a hydroponics house, or both.

Finding my way from Karori to Newtown to pick up Chris and Nick was quite the adventure. Roads in very hilly cities (and their boroughs) just don’t work the way roads in flat cities do — even cow-path towns like Boston. You may know, for instance, that you want to go downhill, and generally to the right. But if you pick a road that seems to go down and generally rightwards, it may well drop you into a gully that will bend you around to the left and keep you going that way for several kilometers, because there’s some natural barrier — a sharp ridge, or a park or something — that hems you in on the right. If you want to go down and right, you must first actually go up and left, which will put you on a bridge *over* the gully, and set you on another ridge which will allow you to go along to the right, and eventually let you take a little hairpinned thing that no one in their right mind would dignify by calling it a “street” down the face of the ridge to another road, in another gully, which after a series of reversals will get you more or less pointed in the right direction again. Mind you, at every turn you will be presented with stunning views down into valleys of houses and parks and down to the harbor, none of which you can stop and photograph for your blog, because in between the drive entrances (some of these houses have parking on their roofs, the hills are that steep) are parked cars, and the street isn’t really wide enough for one car, let alone two to pass and a parked one, and there’s no telling whether some sleep-depped Victoria U student in a battered old Hyundai isn’t going to come barrelling at you from around that blind corner…

At any rate, I made it to Newtown and found the Kendo meeting — and just in time, too, since the meeting was just wrapping up…. Okay, no it wasn’t. I got to listen in on some of the local martial arts club politics before driving back out the Hutt to drop Nick in Pinehaven (Nick’s dad, I suspect, would give Bill and I both a run for our Geek credentials) and take Chris and myself home. So, kinda pooped here. Wish I could say I was looking forward to work.