Amy Jean Comes to Town

What a great visit we had with Amy. She arrived here on Friday morning right on-time and we went back to our place where there was a "Wellcom" sign waiting for her. Amy settled in and took her necessary "I've been on a plane for way too many hours and I feel disguisting" shower. (She opened up her suitcase and pulled out some beloved Junior Mints for me and New Yorkers for Tony. She also showed me what she brought for my kids, but that is another story for a bit later.)
We then went into the center of Wellington to walk around a bit, have lunch at a very old Wellington establishment, Caffe L'Fare, which serves up these delicious mochas in a bowl to go with your food. We then stopped at Zeke's preschool to pick up him and his friend, William, both of whom excitedly greeted Amy and showed her around.
We relaxed around the house in the afternoon, just popping into Kelburn for a little treat with the kids. We sat around smelling the challah cooking while Amy gave out the gifts to the three kids. For those of you who don't know about "Webkins" - only give them to your children if you have an extra computer for them to take over. From the moment that Amy gave the kids their little stuffed animal "webkins" and told them how they can go on the computer to register and adopt them and then do heaps of other stuff (eg. play games to win money to buy their pets things like beds, treadmills, etc.), we barely saw them they were so busy on the computer. This was all well and good until at approximately 5:45 am Saturday morning the kids came into our room to get help from Tony to get back to their webkins site. They were from that point on deemed "webkins addicts."
A bit later that morning (around 7 am) Amy and I left to go for a run down along Oriental Bay which is nice and flat and goes around the bay with the hills going up around in every direction.
We came back and got ready to drop the kids at my friend, Kerrie's house so that Tony, Amy and I could take the cable car down to the train station to go out on our wine tour for the day. The train was not exactly beautiful, but it got us out to the Wairarapa Valley where we were met by a great tour guide named Les. We went directly to our first vineyard called Tirohana where we tried some delicious Pinot Noirs (Amy bought a bottle of the Award Winning 2005 Pinot, while Tony and I bought a bottle of the 2004, which is described in their brochure as "cheeky and precocious"), and a really yummy 2005 dessert wine (had to buy a bottle of that too). The man Ray, who owns the vineyard, and his son-in-law, Toby showed us around and told us about the wines - they were great, and Ray was a real character.
We then went to one of the smallest vineyards in Martinborough, Muirlea Rise, where the son of the owner, Sean, who basically runs the show now, gave us our tour and wine tastings. He too was a very funny guy, and told us that one of the wines we tried was called "Mareth," named after his two grandmothers - Mary and Ethel. He explained that Mary is dead, so any earthy tones we tasted were from her, and that Ethel is 95 and starting to lose it a bit, so any feelings we have of forgetfulness or woosiness after drinking the wine were from her. We of course had to each buy a bottle of the "Mareth," which actually was a combination of different kinds of grapes so didn't fall easily into one wine category.
The other two vineyards we went to were bigger and much less personal/interesting, but had some decent wines, and were quite pretty. In the middle of the tour we had lunch at a cafe in the Martinborough Square where we shared plates of food with our fellow tourists and had more wine to taste. It was a sweet little cafe with a little shop next to it that had some cute clothes ( a little bonus to the day trip, though Tony did not appreciate it quite as much as Amy and I did).
We took our train ride back to Wellington, picked up the kids from friends and took in some Indian food for dinner.
Sunday we hung around Wellington - Amy saw the tiny temple where I dropped the girls off for Sunday school on our way to an interesting Astanga Yoga class with my friend Kerrie. After class we unfortunately only had time for a cup of coffee and light breakfast since we had to pick the girls back up. Amy loved the cafe on Cuba Street, and we wished that we had had more time there. In the afternoon we went back into town and just wandered around shops, went to the grocery store, then got a bit wet and cold and headed back home for a while. After helping Tony out a bit with the kids, and getting organized for the few days we would be away, Amy and I went out for a girls night with my friends Kerrie and Sam. We had dinner at Chow, one of our Wellington favorite restaurants. We had a great time, but didn't stay out too late since the next morning Amy and I would be off on an early flight to the south island.