Sunday, October 18, 2009

Fantastic Weekend – A Quick Break from my Blog Challenge







As I stirred a pot of mushrooms with a dash of rosemary and then finished cutting the baby carrots that I bought at Oratia Farmers Market yesterday I am reminded of what a perfect weekend we have had.

So let’s go back.

As I packed up to leave work on Friday, one of my workmates wished me a “happy weekend” to which I exclaimed “Liz and Paul are up to stay and it’s the Auckland tweet up tonight, and I am so, so excited”! Suffice to say I do not think he really understood my complete and utter excitement about the weekend. While I do love weekends, I had not been this excited about one for quite a few months.

Mark and I raced home cleaned the house, and then headed off to The Falls in Henderson. This was my second tweetup and certainly will not be my last. I was absolutely blown away by the service and hospitality offered by Alan, Nina and the team there.

What also overwhelmed me was the amount of twitter people (tweeps) that came up and said “you are nessliddell right?” and proceeded to give me a hug and a welcome hello. It is so nice after a few months of tweeting with people to finally meet them in person, and realise that it is not only enjoyable tweeting with them, but also meeting and talking with them in ‘real life’.

After great food, fantastic conversation and lovely wine Liz, Paul, Mark and I headed home. We chatted for a bit and then went to bed.

Saturday morning dawned a beautiful day, and I headed off to the markets to meet my friend Karen. We stocked up on beautiful fresh produce, meat, cheese, bread and bing cherries. Liz had been trying to catch me as I left the house to come with me, however could not get the door unlocked. So, Liz and Paul popped into the market to have breakfast and then raced off to pick up a Trade Me purchase, after agreeing to dinner at Karen’s place.

Mark and I ended up in Albany for a bit and met Pauline. We got ingredients for dinner and then raced home to feed the cats, and then onto Karen’s for dinner.

We have a lovely dinner with about Karen and 11 others. My friend absolutely loves cooking, as does Liz. So again we had more good food, fabulous conversation and great wine. Paul brought out the PSP and the sing star with “cordless” microphones (I did not think that Karen was going to let him take them home) and the kids started singing. Then the adults joined in a bit later. What surprises me about sing star is that it truly spans generations and it is great fun.

We left happy and full.

This morning we went to The Falls for breakfast with Pauline, Jason, Bri, Sam etc. What started as a booking for 4 ended up as a table for 10! Once again I was totally blown away by the experience and service we received from Alan and the team.

On the way home Paul mentioned there were some geocaches (kind of like a new generation of orienteering) on our way home. We stopped along the way and found two.

As I sit here on the couch and reflect on our weekend, I feel blessed that we have some beautiful, generous friends and have met some truly astounding people through twitter. Thank you everyone for the laughs and great times this weekend.

3 comments:

  1. Oh, what a blast. What I enjoyed about reading this is that I know who you are talking about because I follow them on Twitter - it is definately nice to put a face to the name & hope to have the chance of meeting everyone I have developed a Twitter relationship with. Thanks so much for share @nessliddell ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. We totally enjoyed out weekend with you! it was totally awesome :D

    ReplyDelete
  3. I see you love cooking. I think you're gonna love Julie & Julia then. Lovely to meet you, Vanessa. Thank You for coming to the Tweet Up.

    ReplyDelete