Picture post

Aha!  I’ve worked it out – how to make pictures small enough to upload here for your delectation and delight.

First of all – our amazing mailbox, or house for tiny people.

And this is how the valley usually looks in the morning – just a little mist around (I don’t seem to have one yet that’s completely mist-less)….

And this was taken from the same point… honest… this morning…

I’m loving living here!

Misty morning

My intention here was to show you some lovely pictures of the valley I drive down into each morning.  Our house is 300m above sea level, so there’s a steep drop down to State Highway 2, and this morning, whilst we had a beautiful sunrise at home, once I’d driven 10 minutes along the road, the valley below was filled with fog – it’s a pretty impressive sight – it’s a bit like being in an aeroplane, above the clouds.    However,  the photos I took on my phone are too big to upload to the blog – I need to do a bit of fiddling around to fix that somehow….  Not sure how.  But I’ll try!

We’re here

With some whirlwind decision-making, we’ve moved from the Wairarapa to the Hawkes Bay – and from being in a small township, to being completely rural, on 15 acres of our own land.  Life has changed quite a lot for us in the recent months, and will no doubt continue to do so as we settle into rural life.  I’ve set up this blog to talk about the things we’ve encountered with our move, that were perhaps a bit of a surprise to us.

One of the first things we did was to sort out our mail – this was something that I’d never even considered would be an issue, but when you’re rural, it’s a little different.   We moved into the property, and realized there was no mailbox at the end of either of our driveways.  Strange…. we thought.  We were sure there was one at the end of the “back” driveway when we were at the Open Home and we thought it was odd that the previous owners would have taken it with them.

Going out in the car one day, we spotted a very old wooden mailbox at the side of the road – just about as far aware as you can get from either of our driveway entrances.  This couldn’t be our mailbox, could it?  Who would site a mailbox at a point so far from your actual entrance?  So we drove past, we stopped, and we checked.  And what do you know – it WAS our mailbox.  There was mail for us and the previous tenant in there.  One mystery solved.

But we didn’t want our mailbox there.

I went into the Post Shop to register for Rural Delivery – no cost, but apparently you have to actually “register” (even though we’d already received mail at that address) – and they recommend you speak to your Postie beforehand.  Well, how on earth you’re meant to catch that man in his red van as he shoots around the countryside, I have no idea!  We still haven’t seen him!

I asked the lady in the Post Shop about moving our mailbox, and she said we’d have to speak to the Council.  So off we went to the Council offices, and found a helpful lady there.   We also explained that the address allocated to our property was odd – it was an Argyll Road address, but Argyll Road ends before it gets to our property.  We think our land is a subdivision of a bigger property sometime in the past, and this address has been left with our section.  Could we change it to something more sensible that actually shows people (on Google Maps) where we live?  Yes, we can.

Our Council lady said she’d look into it for us.  They allocate rural addresses by their distance from the State Highway, and as it turns out, we must be 8.31km from the State Highway.  So we had a new address and a shiny number to stick on our mailbox.  But that was still in the wrong place.

So Kevin set to with all the wood he has, and some shingles, and built us a new letter box, that looks like a house for tiny people.  He hauled out the old letter box in its silly position, and installed a new one that the Rural Postie can still reach from the window of his red van.

Success! (Once I can work out how to add photos here, I’ll share with you all a picture of our lovely new mailbox).

Stage One complete!