Featherston French Fair

This weekend was awesome!

So Hayley was coming, which in itself is pretty cool since I haven't seen her since her housewarming way back on January 20th.

Friday night we went out and played pool, luckily Hayley and I both suck really hard at it so noone really won a game, rather we would take turns losing for pouching the 8-ball too early. After a few games we met up with Hayley's friends and went clubbing until 1:30. When we went home we sort of talked a bit too much and forgot to get off, so we had to walk for 30 minutes to get home.

The next morning we were going to visit Gigi in Masterton to go to a French Fair in Featherston. We got on the train and went to Solway Station where Gigi met us and walked us back to the Copthorne Hotel and Resort. We dropped off our bags and went to the playground for the kids (Gigi and Hayley) to play.

After that we went to KFC, while there we planned the rest of the day: Go to French Fair, go back to Masterton, go shopping for me to cook again, go home and watch TV and drink loads of New Zealand wine. Pretty good plan we thought.

Girls and their bags and hats...

Pizza-machine!

"Market trash"

So on to the busstop, get on bus and go to French Fair. As expected we forgot to get off (again), and so we thought we had to walk but didn't. Because as it turned out, Rick the busdriver (who's going to play a major role later on!), offered to go back that way after stopping at Featherston station, we kindly accepted! 20 minutes later we were at the French Fair and could check out the attractions. Rick said he'd be back at 5-10 past 5 which gave us about 3 hours at the fair.

Personally I don't think it was awesome, but there was a lot of what I would call regular market trash for sale. They did have a fucking (and this is AWESOME!) mobile pizza-bakery! That's like, amazing! A car with a giant wood-fired pizza-oven on the back of it! Oh well. I bought a gift for Marta and the girls went shopping too and got a few things. The coolest thing was probably the Betty Boob coasters that Hayley got. How she can call them girly I have no idea about!

French Fair. That was the name. While people did dress up like stereotypical french people, we didn't meet any. 7-finger chocolate man was from Belgium and the apple-juice man from Romania. The rest were presumably Kiwis.

Eventually it was time to go and so we left, waiting for the bus. Rick did come back, but he was going the wrong way! Well: He had misunderstood us or we had misunderstood him, so he thought we were going back to Martinborough and not Masterton. Whoops! We got on the bus anyways because we did not want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere at a closed French Fair without french people.


We got to Featherston station where we would have to wait for 3 hours for the train to arrive. Rick saw that we were in a kinda sucky position and gave us an amazing offer again:

Featherston

He would go to Martinborough, come back and fuel up, park the bus, and take another bus home and drop us off at Copthorne because he lives in Masterton and Solway is on the way there. We couldn't really say no to such a great offer and got off in Featherston.

Back in Featherston we went shopping for groceries and got an ice cream while waiting for Rick to get back. Rick got there and fueled his bus, we got on, he parked it, and boarded the smaller slightly broken schoolbus. On the way back we had some great discussions on the development of the whole area where he's lived most of his life, spending 18 years in Australia since there was no work in New Zealand.

Bus 199 before departure to Solway

So Greytown, which we passed through on our way back, was the first inland town in New Zealand. It was created when all the rich people had bought the good land along the coasts mostly on the South Island, so poor people had no options for starting up. For 25 pounds they could but 1 acte land in Greytown to build a house on, and get 25 acres of land to grow to grow crops on somewhere around the city. With no money however, they couldn't afford to clear off the bush and start growing crops so after a few years you had a small town with a whole lot of poor people with big houses and no land because it had all been sold to the rich people. Masterton and Carterton which are nearby, were named after the two people behind this seemingly great initiative, Masters and Carter.

Anyways, we got back to Copthorne and thanked Rick many times for being so damn amazing throughout our day (which without him would have gone terribly wrong!). And I started cooking.

Pasta with a sauce made of: leak, carrots, beans, capcicum, tomato sauce and then some fried bacon. The girls loved it and it was truly amazing!

That was my weekend! Tomorrow back to Welly and work on project and relax! It was great seeing Hayley again and we had a great experience just, messing up our entire plan for saturday!