OOOOOhakune

Just arrived back from the mountain, via Sasa's first birthday party. Bit tired, and still residually cold, but coping.

No surprises that we ended up at Crow on Thursday night. I went to Mea Cupla and Dida's first, making it a bigger night than intended. Dida's was great, luckily we had a friend working there so we managed to get in, as it's always packed. Perfect tapas and great wine, so it's easy to see why. Crow was fun, but on the quiet side, which was a shame as the D4 were dj-ing and playing some great stuff.

Managed to escape Auckland at 1.30 on Friday, which was a little later than planned, but there was lots of running around involved. Trip was pretty uneventful apart from a very unfortunate speeding ticket in National Park. Not good. Policeman was obsessed with demerit points and didn't take well to my response of "Who cares about demerit points?" when he asked me how many I had...now I have 55.

We found our chalet without a problem and spent the night drinking and playing Singstar after we borrowed a television from some kind neighbours. The next morning Jess and I made breakfast before the ski obsessed Isabel, Erica and Hannah headed off for the mountain. Goose had already left at dawn to get a in full day. Et, Jess and I had no such motivation and lazed around before heading into town for coffee and hanging out at the Powderkeg, where we met up with Mark and his friends.

That night we hung out together at the chalet, for another round of drinks and Singstar before heading out to a party at Simon's house, where Mark was. It was a fun party with a huge fire going. We stayed there until we got too many dirty looks for taking over the stereo, so we headed into Mardi Gras proper. Which was actually quite hideous, and kind of like paying to go into a death camp. We were thinking about leaving after we'd tried a few revolting bars, and then somehow scammed out way into a party at the Powderkeg. Et and I were still keen to go home though so we used our new handy trick of smoking inside in order to get asked to leave (she likes to do it while saying loudly "The bar gets fined not the individual"). Highly amusing. So we did go home, and I got a semi-early night before the drive back in the morning.

We were away at 7.30, and made it back to Auckland in five hours. When we turned up at Tiffany's with presents in hand, the fairy bread was in full swing. Sasa is very sweet and growing up super quickly, even though he has recently been forced to become a vegetarian...A good end to a fun, if action packed weekend.