Moving On

So most of January was spent hanging out with youth, organising and running family services and having a big clear out of our offices so we could leave Rangiora with resources in some sense of order. We said goodbye to our very good and faithful friends, the Trotter family, who moved to Wellington but for most of our other friends things were less final as we thought we'd only be down the road! This photo is of our wonderful small group - the Fisher family and Joe! - who we will miss heaps.


The church held a relaxed leaving do for us which involved various desserts (always good) and many people had lovely things to say about our time with them. Dessert featured highly in our goodbyes because we also went with our youth small group to 'Strawberry Fayre' for their infamous chocolate (had to be) dessert - a visit we had been planning for a long time. Sam brought along his sombrero and, as cool a role model as he is, I think it will be a while before Matthew can fill his shoes/hat!



Having found out that we were going to be moving back to the UK, packing took on a whole new dimension. We needed to work out what items we wanted to ship back (11 boxes instead of the 9 we came with which I think is pretty good considering we've had a baby!), return borrowed items to their owners and then sell everything else! So we had a garage sale! They are very popular in NZ and a little like a car boot sale though run from your own garage so the scope of things to sell is much larger. I'd been to a couple when we first arrived and couldn't believe some of the junk that people tried to sell - items that I wouldn't even give away! But my friend, Anna, often finds bargains so i think you've just got to know how to look.
I was slightly nervous as I'd heard that people turn up really early, regardless of the advertised start time and that some can be quite mean with bargaining - something I'm not very good at. But our friends Jacqui and Paul sold some of their stuff too and we had a laugh. Our garage was full of tables of clothes, CDs, books, tupperware, crockery, baby things, beds, chest freezer, chairs etc but it soon went and we were packed up by 1pm with only a couple of boxes of things left to take to a charity shop and having made a tidy profit! The Hurleys also sold some of our newer and more expensive items on Trade-Me for us which was such a blessing as we had no idea what we were doing and they are excellent consultants!

So all that was done in under 3 weeks! On the 17th February we left a very empty house, called in on friends to say some hard, final goodbyes (reality beginning to sink in at this point) and waved farewell to Rangiora.