An Officer in a foreign land: The First Few Days

I appear to find myself with a bit of time to 'Blogg'. I am now on day 2 of work, and that is work in the loosest sense of the word. The Battery that i am supposed to be working with have deployed on exercise for 2 weeks, without me. I therefore have the job of chief seat warmer in the coffee, or 'smoko' room. Either that or i sit and talk about people we know with the Regimental 2ic who is an ex-Brit. Either way i am home at lunchtimes! The other good thing is that when they talk about going away for a long exercise, I think of 4 weeks minimum and being thrashed for that entire period. They mean no more than 10 days in the 'bush' at a sedate pace. Brilliant.

We had a lovely weekend, in a mix of power tools and walks. I needed a manly boost so went and bought some tools, to fix baby gates with etc...I ended up drilling holes in things that didn't need holes, and wanted to find a use for my brand new 450 piece drill bit collection, for the girls reading this you probably wont understand.

We ventured out into the hills, and found the most amazing scenery. We very quickly ran out of superlatives for the views. Breathtakingly beautiful countryside. I also found it very amusing that they refer to hiking as 'Tramping'. This conjured up images of beating up old men that smelt of stale wee. We beat up no men on our first Tramp. Jocelyn is the proud owner of a backpack, she can now sit on Dads back whilst he kicks the crap out of the homeless, or goes for a nice walk. She also gets to pull hair, ears and constantly kick my kidneys for hours on end. Excellent. We strolled through an area of the Manawatu Gorge, which is simply outstanding. I will not talk about it too much more as words will not do it justice. All of the pictures are from there.