During our Sabbatical, Martin and I are hoping to go camping every four weeks' or so. Around 6 weeks ago we were at Ambury Park, and a few weeks after that it was our church camp. Last week we were off again, this time to a new-to-us regional park called Waitawa. All the extra exercise I've been doing during the Sabbatical has really improved my fitness, and it felt realistic to try for a campsite 35km away from the nearest train station :-)
During the remainder of our Sabbatical Martin and I are hoping to go camping for a week each month, so last Sunday after church we headed off to Ambury Park. My fitness has definitely improved: the first time we went there it took me 1h13; this time was 58 min cycling time, although a little more than that as we stopped near the park to buy mandarins from a family fundraising for their son's rugby boots. Quite a treat to have extra fruit when camping - heavy things are always at a premium!
There was hardly anyone in the campsite so we put our tent a bit closer to the amenities area than usual - and right next to a stunning wee glade that stayed remarkably dry when it rained.
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On the whole we had fantastic weather, but it was a bit wet on Sunday when we were getting there (and on Friday on the way home, too). We were using our old tent, which isn't wonderfully waterproof, hence the tarp over the top for extra protection. The photo above is from Monday morning, and you can see all our wet stuff drying on a long line at the right!
We've been away for most of April, one way and another. We had two weeks' with Martin's parents in Whangārei, followed by 10 days at home then a week in Taupō and Napier.
Here are a few highlights from Whangārei...
Kamo fizzy spring
Martin and I are just back from four nights camping at the Schischka campground at Wenderholm Regional Park. It's one of six Auckland Council campgrounds we know of that are accessible by public transport and/or foot and bike; to get to this one we bus to town, bus to Silverdale and bus to Waiwera, then it's a 30-40 min walk (mostly through bush) to the campsite. It's about 3 hours door to door, and for a lot of that we were on the top deck of a double decker bus :-)
Neither of us took many photos - we were mostly just enjoying a very peaceful quiet week to mark the start of our six month Sabbatical - but below are a few pictures from the trip.
There was hardly anyone in the campsite so we were able to take up heaps of space. We've recently bought a second pair of adjustable poles for the tarp. The Schischka campsite doesn't have any picnic tables or substantial trees, so the extra poles were very helpful in enabling us to make a nice cool resting space for the hot afternoons.
This past weekend Martin and I were camping with our friend Anna at Ōmana Regional Park. It's actually the first place Martin and I ever camped together, but it turned out to be a much nicer place than either of us had remembered - apparently arriving completely exhausted last time had put more of a pall on things than we'd realised!
This time we traveled by bus: the 195 to Pt Chevalier shops, the 65 across to Greenlane (Anna met us on that bus), the 70 to Botany town centre then then 739 through to Beachlands. From there it was a maybe 20-30 min walk to the campsite with our stuff packed in one large pack each. I particularly enjoyed the #70 bus as it took us through my old stomping grounds of Ellerslie, Panmure and through to Pakuranga Plaza - and we were on the top deck of a double-decker, with excellent views :-)
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| our campsite :-) |
This past year has been uncommonly difficult, due to the concussion I acquired almost exactly a year ago. And this past month has been a challenge with a double dose of Covid followed by a bee sting that's led to a significant infection, both of which have set my energies back a lot. However, Monday a week ago I was doing my New Year's Examen and was encouraged to realise quite how amazing one thing that had happened this year was.
1 - Church Women's Conference
In July our church held a one day 'women's conference'. It was the first one, and I had no idea what to expect from it - and wasn't sure if I could make it, as I was still very much limited by my concussion. But I got hold of the programme and decided to go to the main morning session, with a plan to go home over lunch and some workshops and return for the main afternoon one.
The morning session turned out to be a brief session of teaching (I can't remember what on, but by a woman from the church a close friend of mine goes to), followed by a time when you could reflect or come to the front for someone to pray for you. Three other women from my friend's church were also there, and they were all part of a prayer team I'd heard a lot about and felt confident in.
They were asking people to come forward specifically if there were lies in their lives that were holding them back. At one point the woman doing the asking said "maybe there's a voice in your head that says you're useless". Without really even considering it, I stood up and went forward (most unusual for me!). Ever since I first developed CFS, when I get tired and sore, I feel like a bad person and want to hurt myself - and one of the persistent thoughts that comes at those times is that I'm useless.
There were two rows of women at the front by the time I got there, and the three prayer ladies were going from person to person, praying briefly by some and at great length by others, as they felt God instructing them to. The speaker was also saying little bits from time to time about what we could be praying about ourselves. I think she said to specifically name the words in your head as lies and ask God to take them away, but what I really remember was when she said to ask God what words He wanted to put in their place. As soon as I did that, a phrawe popped into my head: "You are My Light in the World". It was so unexpected! But also a very Biblically-correct idea (e.g. in Matthew 5), not just some random thing, and I figured it was likely from God.
So I prayed about that for a bit there. And, over the following weeks, whenever I found myself starting to tell myself I was useless and bad, I resisted articulating that and worked on saying "I am God's Light in the World" instead.
In maybe a few weeks that lie was gone. Doing the New Year's reflection I realised that, with very little input from me, God has taken away something that's made me miserable for years. Thank you, Jesus! It has come back occasionally since, but reminding myself that I am God's light in the world seems to generally deal with it fairly quickly :-)
2 - Strategy to deal with concussion cognitive issues
That wasn't the only significant encouragement from recent months.
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| I loved this house near my niece's place in Wellington. The monarch butterfly to the right of the door was made by the son of one of our neighbours here in Auckland. He lives in Newtown and heaps of the houses in the area were decorated with them :-) |
Over October/November we were in Wellington/Upper Hutt/Whanganui visiting various friends and relatives. We'd hoped to do this trip back in April, but that wasn't realistic due to the concussion. By October, however, I was mostly back to normal with physical stuff (walking, biking swimming etc.), although still more fatigued than previously and still really struggling with doing most cognitive stuff. My concussion physio (through ACC) had given me strategies that had led to steady improvement with my physical symptoms, but I'd found the cognitive strategies recommended by the OT from the same service much less helpful and was feeling pretty stuck.
One person we were visiting on our trip was my friend Louise, who's also a concussion OT. One day she was kind enough to sit down with me and talk through the problems I was having and what she'd recommend if I was her client. It was a completely different approach from what my OT had suggested. Rather than doing exercises (the various worksheets I'd been given previously), she suggested I pay really close attention to how I was doing. She didn't quite put it like this, but what I've taken from it is this:
That last bit (feeling as good as I felt before I started) felt impossible. I always deteriorate significantly during the day - even before the concussion. But I tried to give it a go and it mostly works. Sometimes I've needed to rest only 20 min or so; 30-ish minutes seems typical, sometimes it's been well over an hour. But I do get back to a point where doing the same work feels pretty easy again :-)
This meant I was able to get stuck into the Just Kai Christmas recommendations when I got back. And I literally did as many Just Kai hours in those two weeks as I'd done in the whole year previously - and that without feeling absolutely disgusting at any point! It was a bit of a miracle.
The idea is that this approach will encourage my brain to slowly heal. The time since Wellington has been pretty disrupted (especially this past month), so I can't say I've seen steady improvement in my capacity - but I can say I now have an approach to get way more stuff done than before, and to do it without wiping myself out and feeling absolutely awful afterwards. Hopefully I'll also see actual improvement in time, but it's still an immense and hugely encouraging change.
3 - Small planes have low emissions
For our October/November holiday we flew to Wellington, caught a bus to Whanganui then flew home from there. When I was calculating the carbon emissions for our trip, I noticed something very surprising. The flight to Wellington generated 195kg CO2e across the two of us, whilst the flight back from Whanganui generated only 69kg CO2e (again, for two people).
Why?
Have a look at the screenshots of the detailed info for the two flights.
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| to Wellington |
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| home from Whanganui |
I use the atmosfair calculator in part because it allows you to specify the make of plane used. Looking at the screenshots you can see that, whilst the distance for the second flight was noticeably shorter, by far the biggest difference comes in the emissions related to contrails and ozone. These are significant drivers of climate change, but only occur when fuels are burned at high altitude. For the Wellington flight we were in an Airbus A320 - a biggish plane seating around 170 people. For the flight home we were in in SAAB340 - a much smaller 34-seater plane. Small planes don't fly as high (you can see the altitude difference in the screenshots above), but I hadn't previously realised that such planes weren't flying high enough to form contrails etc. That was super-exciting information!
We're not 100% sure what we'll do with this new knowledge. One thing we'll definitely be looking into is flying to Kāpiti Coast airport rather than Wellington airport next time we're heading that way. Air Chathams flies there daily (in the same SAAB340 planes), and from there it's about 90 min by bus and train to the Wellington CBD. Total carbon emissions under 80*kg CO2e for two people - compared to 195 kg on the regular plane!
*the AirNZ little planes are even more carbon efficient than the Air Chathams once - presumably as they still fly low but carry twice as many people.
We decided many years ago to do only one domestic flight every three years, as part of limiting our carbon emissions - and those flights have basically all been to Wellington or Whanganui. I've now realised we can do those flights for half the carbon emissions we previously expected/generated. Could we fly more often? We're not sure, as that original target was pretty arbitrary and our emissions are still well above sustainable, but we're certainly wondering about it.
I've also realised that Air New Zealand also uses small planes (in their case ATR72s, which even have a slightly smaller per-passenger carbon footprint than the SAAB340s) to service a bunch of regional airports such as Napier. I have a good friend in Napier, and found the drive there two years ago pretty grueling. We're hoping to go back this year and had been thinking to travel via Intercity Gold bus seats. I'm still interested in giving that a go, but am also wondering about flying at least one way: it turns out the emissions from flying are only double that of the bus!!!
Photos from Wellington/Whanganui
I didn't do a proper blog post when I got back from Wellington/Upper Hutt/Whanganui as I got stuck straight into Just Kai stuff as soon as I was able, but here's a few photos of what we got up to.
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| A statue of Katherine Mansfield, made up of fragments of her writing. I was captivated by this when I first spotted it as a teenager, and was delighted to see it's still there. |
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| Printing a T-shirt (for me) with my niece :-) |
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| with my Aunty Elspeth and cousin Karlene in Whanganui |
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| Martin and the Whanganui river |
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| my Whanganui relatives (except for my cousin Garth's daughter) |
Aunty Elspeth also showed me some old family photos I'd never seen before. Apparently my grandad (who died long before I was born) was a gymnast!
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| my grandad's the man kneeling on the right, half-way up the picture. |
Last Thursday Martin and I headed off for a camping holiday at Shakespear Park. It was remarkably easy to get there - biked to Avondale train station, train to town, ferry to Gulf Harbour and about 40 min bike to the campsite. And, whilst I still have a number of concussion symptoms, this was something I can now comfortably achieve :-)
Us Avondale train station with our stuff:
Martin and I were due a 5-day mini break this weekend. With my ongoing concussion issues, I found the logistics of planning an actual trip away too daunting - plus, the idea of sleeping in a tent didn't much appeal, as I'm still strapping my arm every night to treat an entrapped ulnar nerve. So we decided on a 'staycation'. I mostly had the internet off, and didn't use my computer except for a twice-daily concussion exercise that involved watching a video. We bought in some yummy food, sourced a good book and had a weekend mostly without plans. It's been really nice :-)
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| banana cake for yummy snacks |
Last April Martin and I camped at Ambury Park, the only council campsite we can get to solely by bike :-) We'd thought it'd be a good place to bring people who hadn't been camping before: it's a fairly flat site, has non-smelly toilets and even hot showers(!), is pretty affordable, and is only a 20 minute drive from where we live, so very accessible for many of our friends.
We tried to get a group from church to join us camping there this past weekend. Various things came up that meant we ended up camping on our own, but friends from church came out to join us on both the Friday and Saturday mornings :-)
Bird-watching walk with our Saturday visitors:
Last weekend, Martin and I had a 5-day break at the Pae o te Rangi campground in the Cascades area of the Waitakere Ranges, near-ish to Te Henga/Bethell's Beach.
We caught the train to Swanson then got on our bikes - as you can see, it had some steep bits!
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| Biking up the first steep bit, to Waitakere township. I forgot to take my asthma inhaler when I first got on the train (it takes 30 minutes or so to kick in), so I was struggling with asthma up this bit and Martin had to take over my bike a little before the top. |
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| the gradient of the route as a whole |
Back in the day when my niece went vegan I had a go at making vegan cheese. I ended up with a nice savoury spread (mostly made of cashews and nutritional yeast), but it wasn't much like cheese! I never tried it again as it didn't seem hugely worthwhile.
However, I've recently seen that people are now making vegan cheese that's:
So in late April I started my first batch of chickpea aged cheese (i.e. fermented like dairy cheese, but vegan), and 9 weeks later (!) I had my first cheese.
I followed the recipe, which called for shea butter as one of the ingredients. I've decided I don't like the shea butter taste that is still very present in the final product, but on the whole I'm pleased with the result. On it's own I find the shea taste too strong, but it worked well on ratatouille :-)
Martin and I are just back from a long weekend camping at Ambury Park. It's the only Auckland Council campground that's comfortably within my biking range, so no public transport was involved. There was something magic about getting on our bikes outside our house, and riding off to a different world :-)
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| Me heading off. We started on the road but joined the cycleway at Bollard Ave and took that all the way to Māngere Bridge :-) |
The other week Martin and I walked another section of the Manukau Coastal Walkway (at this point also called the Waikowhai Walkway) - catching the bus past Blockhouse Bay to the top of Gilletta Rd, walking down to Lynfield Cove and then through bush and suburban streets to Wattle Bay before catching the bus home from Canberra Rd. There were some stunning views!
