Homeward bound

Tomorrow is the day I'm catching the train and going home.  Back to Wangas.  It's been good being in Hamilton for semester, but Wangas has a totally different atmosphere, and its home.  Its generally a pretty good journey on the train, but it is a long one.  Bout twice as long as driving there (mainly cause of all the hills that are too steep for trains and thus that we have to go around - with the exception of the Raurimu spiral that we go up.   As well as the spiral, there's also several bridges and viaducts including the bridge at Tangiwai - the site of New Zealand's worst rail disaster which occurred on Christmas Eve, 1953.  Anyway, so the train will be taking me from Hamilton to Marton tomorrow, then I have to go by car from there to Wangas (a trip of about 1/2 an hour to 3/4 of an hour in length) . 

 I would have been going today, only there's the running of the sheep in Te Kuiti (the shearing capital of the world - according to themselves) - basically a large number of sheep are set loose in the main street of the town, in the largest sheep run in the world - so as a result the train was already fully booked to that point (and that's between Hamilton and Wangas). Should be an interesting time for those who are going to it. 

The one annoyance about going tomorrow, rather than today, is that I'm going to miss Palm Sunday at our church in Wanganui.  Its usually a really neat day there, with the church decorated with palm branches, and you get given palm branches when you go in that you can wave during the worship if you want to, and then at the end there are palm crosses available for you to take away.  One other small thing thats kind of frustrating is it also happens to be daylight saving tonight.  Our clocks go back an hour (so the opposite way to all of you in the northern hemisphere).

Also one negative of heading down to Wangas at all is I won't have my keyboard for 2 weeks.  That being said, I will have my organ again, and I could possibly borrow the church's keyboard if I needed to, so its not entirely bad news.  Just hope that everything will work out with my student loan/allowance now.  Would be nice to find a way to earn/get a little more money while I'm down there cause the cost of things I want/need for this year is just so expensive. 

 Anyway I'd better leave this at this point and go finish packing. Got a long train trip ahead.