Hen’s Do NZ leg

A lot of activities in the last three months have been wedding related. It started off in early July with Sara, Anna, Kattis and many more involved organising my Hen’s do in NZ - a whole day filled with silly but utterly fun activities. Charlie had escaped to Nelson for some biking. I think he knew too much of what was organised to want to hang around. I only knew that I had to be ready at sun rise (whenever that was) with sturdy clothes.

At 9 ish many familiar faces were peaking into our kitchen window and soon the whole kitchen was full of people and breakfast.
The breakfast was followed by a brisk bike ride in the glorious sun shine on three tandem bikes! It was such a cool idea to not be car dependant. I can’t say I was totally surprised since the evening before I had mistakenly come across them all practising with the tandems on a random back street in St Martins. It was only by chance Mel, Sonia and I had chosen to go down that way on our mountain bikes. It was still a pleasant “surprise” to see them all with the bikes on Sat morning. The hill down from Mt Pleasant was a bit freaky to start off with but we all made it to the next stop, archery, without any major dramas.
Kattis, Viv, Anna, Maaike, Ruth, Clare and myself on a mission.

Charlie and I have been talking about trying out archery for 2 years but never made it. I can’t say I loved it. I was pretty shit and it was PURE luck that I happened to be the only one who hit the bull’s eye. We were all pretty average but we had some good laughs.
Lara looking like a pro.

Next stop, waffles at Sara’s place followed by a Heptathlon in the nearby park.
The race involved very serious battles with for example: egg-on-a-spoon, gum boot throwing and Danish drunkenness (I think that's what we call it in Sweden. It involves spinning around with your forehead against a pole until you feel very drunk and sick). After all the events, we had an even score between the teams and had to come up with a final battle. We did some kind of combination of having to dress up with lots of clothes, run around like a mad chicken and pass on the clothes to the next team mate..I also think we incorporated passing around some eggs. People in the building next to the park were staring at us wondering what the heck we were doing.
We all had some bubblie to celebrate victory. This is my Swedish friend collection in Chch (bar Veronika Llewellyn, who couldn't make it): Anna, Kattis, Sara and Ella.
The day was topped off with a delicious dinner at Lara’s place.

Although we are all extremely good looking women, we thought that we’ll try and improve the picture even more by treating us to some face masks. Clare and Ruth found one which seemed to turn your face into plastic. They looked very scary when it looked like they were ripping off the skin to remove the mask.
Anna and I didn't look a lot better in our yogurt coloured masks with cucumber eyes, which were slowly gliding down.

Since it was a bit far to go to the bathroom to rinse off the masks, we set up a big bath in the kitchen that we all used...In early July, the coldest winter in NZ, that is a big No-NO. Sara had a cold brewing that started breaking out later that night. Two days later, I was also sick and as I understand the bad cold got to 6 out of 10 of us! I had quite a bit of time off the following week since I wanted to make sure I would feel well for the following weekend when Charlie and I had our Practise Wedding Party.

After top-notch performance by all of us in Sing Star, we were all exhausted and we never made it into town (I am quite pleased about that since there is a high likelihood of involving a bad hang-over the following day).

I had a fab day and I want to thank all of you girls who were involved in organising it all!