What - no rugby?

After eight matches, forty five cans of Speights and twenty serves of fish and chips in three days, it was a compulsory time-out on Monday and Tuesday for the liver, the larynx and the eyeballs to recover. But how on earth were we going to survive until the next scheduled matches on Wednesday? And one of those three Wednesday matches will be the highly anticipated Scotland v Georgia match we are to attend in Invercargill tomorrow. Could we survive two whole days with no rugby to watch? Well, time to get act together and focus on sorting out the last vestiges of Georgia supporters gear to take south i.e we needed a pole for the metre-wide Georgian flag and we needed red and white face paint. That's a big ask when the England team is in Dunedin with 15000 English fans for three whole weeks and they've all painted their faces for the Argie match.

Enzo the Apache awaits call to action

Monday dawned grey but fine (see above) and Fi swished open the curtains, lapped up the view and (leaving Mike raising zeds) jumped into Enzo the Apache and headed to South Dunedin to shop for postcards, stamps and stuff Georgian. She came back instead with an official Wallabies Tshirt for Mike for AUD25. Then we shot back into central Dunedin in Enzo and had a blue cod and chips and Bluff oyster lunch at the Best Cafe in Stuart Street. This cafe has no website but it has the best fish and chips on the planet, no joke. Laminate tables, only ten items on the menu, the interiors look like a blastback from 1962 but the food is amazing. We staggered over to the i-site tourist bureau for info on local walks, got some face paint and drove home up the hill and started the blog. Mike dished up mutton stew from the slow cooker for dinner and we cranked up the heating in preparation for a Tuesday that promised some snow on the hilltops and some truly icy southerlies.

Tuesday (today) was bitingly cold but clear, a maximum of eight degrees. No snow, but a wind chill factor of -15. Another retail therapy day. Bunnings provided us with poly pipe for the flag, we bought a daggy coffee table at a South Dunedin flea shop and we had lunch at Delicacy again after a one hour tromp around the Dunedin Botanic Gardens where magnolias, rhododendrons and daffs were in glorious bloom. We visited the aviary which had several specimens of toucan, a really cranky white cocky and a very busy kea (digging below). There were also lots of very colourful finches and there is a very attractive picture of the derriere of one below:

Kea digging his way to China

Orange finchy thingo

Mike blogged all afternoon so Fi took off in Enzo to visit Aramoana via Port Chalmers. She noted the Carey's Bay Hotel as a future potential site for lunch and was struck by how Port Chalmers with its massive wharf cranes and Victorian-era buildings looked much as Fremantle must have looked back in the 1950s. She froze while walking on the old jetty at Aramoana but was greeted by a curious seal on her return to the car so that sort of made up for the blue fingers. The albatrosses from neighbouring Taiaroa Head were nowhere to be seen. So back up the hill home again and it was stew for dinner, Chris Tarrant on the TV and hot apple pies from the Danish patisserie in Hillside Road for supper while watching the full moon rise over the Otago Peninsula from our eyrie. A three hour drive to Invercargill in the morning, two matches to watch at the pub and then we don triple layers of everything to survive eighty minutes of Scotland v Georgia. We'll be two of probably twenty people dressed in red at the match, the Scots of course will be in navy blue. Gagimarjos Sakartvelos!