SV Panta Rhei Retirement Trip

We are making progress on several maintenance fronts. The drive shaft is reinstalled, the heat exchanger is rebuilt, and the fuel lines are all removed. And the good news is that while some of this was happening, Karen and I were visiting friends Debbie and Keith Clausen in Hamilton NZ. I have a picture with this posting so you can see who they are. They are standing in front of a Remu tree. Remember the wood that Grant made our anchor brace with? Well, its precious wood from a NZ native tree and now you can see that this tree is different. Actually it grows in many places in NZ but only slowly. Its a protected species. I was surprised to see that its foliage looked like desert foliage.

We met Debbie and her daughter Sarah on the Milford Track and we had them aboard Panta Rhei for a weekend of local sailing. Now we get to see where they live. Keith is a builder who is just a (very) little younger than Larry. They shared their home and their community with us and even took us to the nearby seashore town on the Tasman side of NZ (Raglan) which featured kite surfing, surfing, skateboard parking, great seaside views and restaurants and a georgous drive through NZ farmland. We also got to go to Keith's bother's dairy. He milks an awful lot of cows every day (about 750). Its an impressive process. It is also the number one industry in NZ, so it really completes our tourist view of the country! There is a lot to learn here. Their lives are shaped just slightly differently than ours by their assured medical care and retirement income. They are considerably more entrepreneurial than people in the US. They can take risk. They work just as hard as we do in the US, but they are more aggressive about starting small enterprise. The humor is similar, but the words they use are curious. We had cackleberries (eggs) for breakfast and ate so much that Larry gained a stone (14 pounds)...or fraction thereof. Their food is great, yet they do not have Velveeta cheese. Can you believe it?