A View from the Top (of the South)

Hello again, long ignored blog. I am so sorry to have abandoned you for so long. But I'm back now, and I promise this time will be different. Really. Give me another chance!



Actually, I have been somewhat busy. Well, you'd hope so, given that I haven't written in almost six months. Hopefully I'll be able to update everything in the near future. I have tons of ideas, it's just a matter of sitting down and typing it out.

But this will be a short-and-sweet post. I'm back to blogging.

So, to update since December: I worked in the vineyards in a town called Blenheim and I hated every moment of it. The last day of work was pure bliss. I threw my gloves in the trunk of my car and triumphantly declared that as God as my witness, I would never work in the vineyards again! Then I got a kidney stone and went to the beach. Seriously. Kaikoura, on the east coast. After that, Hanmer Springs, a delightful little mountain town. Christchurch followed, then Lake Tekapo, Mt. Cook and a town with a giant fruit sculpture called Cromwell. The Irish historians among you might find the name interesting given that there is a divide within the town itself between the Northern Ireland-named sections and the Republic of Ireland-named sections.

Somewhere between Mt. Cook and Cromwell (specifically, as I stood on a platform overlooking a glacier in the Mt. Cook township), I got a phone call from Blenheim. Libby, a New Zealander who had spent the summer working in the wine industry in Sonoma and living with a mutual friend, had recently gotten a job at a local winery and wanted to rent a house in Blenheim. She was calling me because she knew I was interested in working in the wine industry and, more specific to her needs, was looking for a flatmate. Despite my earlier hatred of the town, I'd seen the house before I left and loved it despite its over-reliance on a blue color scheme. I agreed to move in.

So, I headed back to Blenheim, stopping for a short visit to Nelson, the city about 90 minutes from Blenheim. Libby had suggested I call a friend of hers who was looking for an employee. Specifically, a vineyard employee for Cloudy Bay winery. Even more specifically, a tractor driver. I may have vowed never to work in a vineyard again, nor had I ever driven a tractor or anything even closely resembling farm equipment (I am not sure I've even driven a pickup truck), but I gave her friend a call. And in the midst of the second quarter of the Super Bowl, I got a call back: I got the job.

Over the next few months I happily worked in the vineyards (seriously -- it was mostly fun!). I singled out the strongest and straightest shoots on baby vines, I dropped rot-infested bunches ahead of harvest and, most fun of all, I drove tractors around in big, giant circles, usually collecting grapes that will become some high-priced Marlborough wines.

Tractor driving, though, is a transient position, and I lost that job at the end of April. Since then, I've been doing a little traveling, starting off in Christchurch, then to Queenstown, Milford Sound, Te Anau, Doubtful Sound, Franz Josef (glacier and township), Hokitika and back to Blenheim a few days ago. Now I'm doing a little writing, a lot of reading and occasionally some listening to Giants games. There's pruning work to be done in the vineyards, and I think in the very near future I will be back, again, for my third stint as a migrant farm worker. New Zealand farm workers, however, get totally gipped. We don't have any taco trucks rolling up for a delightful mid-afternoon snack. That sucks.

That's my life in a nutshell. Hopefully as the weeks go on, you'll read all about things like canyon swinging, glacier hiking and unfortunate drunken Scottish tourist girls stripping in decidedly non-stripping locations. Until then, goodnight.