Wet and not exactly wild

On my return from the South Island, I thought some time without horrific amounts of travelling were involved so I settled in for a few days at my boyfriend's accommodation attempting yet another redesign of my poorly attended portfolio and developing some tutorials.

The days have flown by and productivity, at least from the point of view of my tutorial development, has been high. My portfolio is still in its poor neglected state, having tried several redesigns, all of which I considered to be awful much before I'd got to the first rollover.

After a fairly flat day yesterday, I decided today would be a Doing Stuff day and it was high time I got back in the driving seat of Pulsar the Hire Car and tackled the New Zealand countryside once more in search of beautiful things to not take pictures of and opportune moments of me with various not-quite-visible backdrops to take pictures of instead.

I was able to tear my boyfriend away from whatever complicated learning process he was enduring to come and join me on my adventure (he has been writing confusing and offensive equations on large pieces of paper that I presume he intends to put on the wall and I have more fuel to add to the ever increasing fire of the fact that he is now officially a plane geek, only differing from a train spotter in the fact that he can fly one).

Our destination was severely hindered by the fact that it started raining at around midnight last night and has not yet stopped. And I'm not talking your average rain. I'm talking rain that, even as a Cornish gal who has lived between two moors since she was 8 and has seen more downpours than I imagine most people get to experience in a life time, I find offensive.

Most people, when I told them I was coming out to New Zealand in July and was staying here for a month in the middle of winter, told me I was stupid. I agreed. Departing the sweltering heat of the UK's first heat wave in god knows how long to go to a town that has been described to me as the Kiwi equivalent of Slough (add a touch of middle America and you're not far off) in their equivalent of November was, indeed, stupid. However, where boyfriend is, girlfriend must travel to and I was quite happy with the notion of simply seeing him, everything else would come second, including what to actually do with my time.

While the first few days were fairly sodden, the weather over the past few weeks has been at worst dry and at best absolutely amazing, with temperatures of 16 degrees +. In hindsight, if the weather had been bad over the last couple of weeks I would either have had a novel by now or attempted suicide. But I experienced an amazing week of WebStress adventures in the North and then headed down to the South Island just as the rain began to pour up here and had just begun to blossom in the South. Jammy is one word that no one ever describes me as, but I felt it. Especially when the day after I arrived back the weather was so bad in the South they had to close the airport that I'd flown from the night previously.

So I knew it was coming. My boyfriend's frequent checking of the weather reports indicated that it was coming and that flying was definitely going to be canned (I refuse to actually call him a pilot until he can fly in anything other than dry, clear, sunny climates).

I had in my first two days here exhausted all the activities in the local town, and in one morning completed everything that was suitable.

But I'd got an activity up my sleeve. My Wet Weather Alternative. The single activity that didn't involve looking at anything beautiful (the visibility wasn't much past my elbow in some of the rain), taking part in an outdoor activity, or generally being outside.

So we set off. An hour's drive to the Waitomo gloworm caves and a 45 minute guided tour. Not too long that my boyfriend would start to panic without his reading materials (he actually brought some in the car but didn't read them so I'll overlook that) and long enough for me to get my explorer fix. After all, Pulsar was running up the money meter and was itching to get out on the open roads.

The rain increased. Rivers were near bank-breaking point, fields were starting to flood.

We arrived at the Black Water Rafting building, 2km before the caves themselves. As we entered the building, signs were being slapped over each and every cave 'closed due to flooding'. This wasn't something I'd considered. Perfect undercover WWA I'd thought. Liable to flooding in the same wet weather had not crossed my mind.

This didn't instil us with confidence, but we asked the woman at the checkout who said that the glowworm caves should still be open, for a while at least.

So my boyfriend put pedal to the metal (as fast as I would let him which probably isn't anything like the speed he would have been happy cruising at) and we headed for the caves.

On arrival, the streams of water cascading down the sides of the carpark and the water penetrating every part of my clothing after thirty seconds of exposure, made me think that this possibly wasn't the best idea.

We arrived at the booth, happy to tackle a reduced tour for half the price as the boat ride had been flooded out. We had to see something at least.

However on overhearing that, while we would get a chance to see the glowworm cave yes, seeing the glowworms were another matter. No boat ride = no glowworms.

We admitted defeat and got back in the car for the long drive home, rain hammering down on the car as we drove.

I was by this point in a rather large sulk. The time that my boyfriend has to spend with me when he isn't working is extremely limited and extremely precious. We were just about to conclude wasting two and a half hours of it.

We were both pretty miserable so we thought we'd eat to cheer ourselves up and break up the return journey.

So we passed through Unmemorable Town #1. Everything was closed apart from KFC, McDonalds and Subway. Not good at the best of times for a vegetarian, even worse for a vegetarian who's struggling to digest dairy products on a day to day basis.

Unmemorable Town #2 passed us by, again with nothing open but KFC, McDonalds and Subway.

I was grumpy, my boyfriend was tired and the radio was choosing this opportune moment to pick all the very worst of New Zealand rock music and play it consecutively. And the pressure headaches that I have had fairly consistently since being here (another ailment of the not-very-well-built-WebStress) increased so much that I was even more grumpy than I would have been (I am a not particularly portable, and rather vocal barometer).

So now I'm back where I was a few hours ago, the rain is still lashing down, my boyfriend is asleep and will soon have to rise and continue the work that he has to do (which will go on all evening, our trade off of him coming out this afternoon was him working this evening) and we only have 4 teabags left and about half a teaspoon full of soya milk.

New Zealand in the rain, like most places, sucks. I have decided to spend the afternoon drinking warm Ribenas until the sugar rush kicks in (always good for entertainment and/or productivity) or just admit defeat and get back into bed.