couldn’t think of a nicer place to spend Christmas! We were the first visitors they’d had at this time of the year and the lady was very surprised to see us! Needless to say we had the place to ourselves, it was so peaceful, so quiet and so dark, the stars were amazing and we again wished that we could have stayed for longer, but we needed to get back to Christchurch to phone the US embassy and try and get two cancellation appointments. Rob went off to phone home so I spent some time catching up with diaries and photos then had a read up about Fiji mainly because it was really cold and I wanted to think about something or somewhere warm! Fiji sounded fantastic and we were both keeping everything crossed that we could get cancellation appointments which would mean we didn’t have to cut short our time in Fiji.

The next morning as we started the drive back to Christchurch we saw a sign for

Chorlton!!! Can you believe it, there is a place in the South Island of New Zealand called Chorlton! We were going to drive to it but it was over 10 km away on very small, winding roads and we figured it would look very similar to the very small villages we had seen along the way on the Banks Peninsula, so we just continued. As we got back into Christchurch we called Penny and were hoping to call the US consulate from her brothers, unfortunately her brother’s wife was non too pleased about Penny calling a premium rate number from her phone so we were back to square one in terms of not being able to call - grrrrr!!! There was nothing else for it but to head to the Christchurch Citizens Advice bureau and hope they would be as accommodating as their Queenstown counterparts! Thankfully they were equally as helpful and let us use their phone. I was particularly annoyed about the fact that we had to wait 5 minutes on hold before the call got answered especially as we were paying $3.45 per minute! God these yanks