Tumbleweed

Greetings from Khandallah, which is a suburb of Wellington where we’ve been housesitting for the past two weeks. Khandallah is in the hills so we’ve been enjoying the great views and easy access to Wellington’s amazing trail network. We’ve been taking care of two cavoodles named Jasper and Nova who are real snuggle bugs. They’ve been fun to spend time with and we’ll miss them when we’re gone. Happy Year of the Rabbit! Nova may be smaller but she’s definitely the alpha Jasper’s pooped from saving leaves from “drowning” in the creek - serious business! Nature exhibit at Te Papa Museum I ❤ albatross Last week we found out that the US Women’s National Team was going to be playing the New Zealand Women’s soccer team at Sky Stadium in Wellington so we quickly got tickets and headed to the game. The Women’s World Cup will be in New Zealand and Australia this July so the USWNT were here to play a couple of ‘friendlies’ with the Kiwis, who are officially known as the Ford Football Ferns. The ga...

After wrapping up our Auckland housesit in early January, we drove south to Taupo where we were planning to spend a couple nights at our friend Catriona’s house followed by a housesit that we lined up through Kiwi House Sitters. Lake Taupo is the largest lake in New Zealand and it sits in the caldera of the Taupo volcano, which hasn’t erupted in 1,800 years but is still considered active, believe it or not. Lake Taupo reminds me of Lake Tahoe as they’re both massive lakes surrounded by beautiful, majestic mountains. We spent a week in Taupo which was bursting at the seams with visitors as it’s peak holiday season right now. Despite the crowds, we had lots of fun going for runs, walks and we also took a nice hot soak at one of the thermal pools in town. Our housesit was probably the easiest one yet as we only had to take care of a cat named Oskar. Oskar was an older cat who loved head butting us (no joke!) and bossing us around, demanding that we feed him Jimbo’s at least five times a d...