Arrival

G'Day Mates-- "Brahan" here, "cheeking" in from the antipodes. Finally we arrived in Dunedin! The flights, particularly with Clay Xavier the babe, were easier than we guessed. That is, until we arrived in Auckland and missed our connecting flight because it took customs ages to determine that our gear was clean enough for entry (dirt=new organisms, which can be disruptive to this island habitat). We then had an epic walk around to the domestic terminal, carting kayak and bike and many kilos of luggage. In the end, all was well. Upon arriving in Dunedin, we were met with much warmth from work colleagues who collected us from the airport, ferried us and gear to the apartment we rented for 2 weeks, showed us the town a bit, lent us a car, etc. Our apartment is right on the ocean, and have a hot tub, so all is well. We will spend lots of time at the beach and in the hot tub (the place of H. Potter readings) for these two weeks, then have another 1 week house rental, then a month on the road, until finally we settle into our long term leased house in St. Clair, a beach suburb--for Coloradoans, it is good to be close to the ocean. We are busy figuring out how things work here: language, driving, banking, telephones. All the things one takes for granted require a bit of stopping and thinking now. I took Estin James down to the beach this morn before work where people are surfing. Lo and behold, a babe is lying on the beach being filmed for a Michelob commercial. Nothing obvious happens for a few minutes, then she pops up and EJ and I witness her delicately shaking the sand off, sort of the way a small dog might shake off after a plunge, starting at the one end and finishing at the other; don't tell Mary I said that. Another 200 meters down, two seals are laid up on the beach resting (no sand being shaken off). We got Mary into a doctor yesterday to check her broken finger and it was pronounced good, so her cast is off, revealing a multi-hued and stiff hand--the hand-specialist in Boulder set her cast with fingers pointed at right angles to normal. On Saturday we went into a bike shop to get Estin a helmet and we came out all done-up as clown and pirate for the Xmas parade in downtown Dunedin. That's right, clowns in a Christmas parade. Estin's trail-a-bike was enough to earn us the ticket as performers. Santa was in the parade too but he was really a minor celebrity amongst the floats, marching bands, clowns on bikes (us and others, bearing super-squirter water guns to douse the crowd in that balmy Christmas weather), and a singing Ronald McDonald (yikes, we don’t understand why Ronald McVoldemort appears in a Christmas parade). Yes, Christmas is going to be different and entertaining. Our arrival here has been a bit like those moments of bringing our first baby, Estin, home from the hospital. There was my brother to provide for us, just as folks were here in Dunedin to smooth the way, and then he quietly withdrew so that we could figure it out.