BAY OF PLENTY

I'm up in the sky flying to Rotorua this morning. My great little online buddy Charlie Gilbert (who gave up the booze on the same day I did in July last year) has very gorgeously invited me for a holiday on their cool new farm in the Bay of Plenty. We feel like old friends as we've been reading and commenting on each other's blogs for over a year, emailing, a few phone calls, and we're both members of the brilliant Living Sober website. So this is the next step in our friendship.....we actually get to meet each other and spend time together. Not the ususal way friendships evolve, but I don't think either of us were ever particularly ordinary!  She's picking me up in Rotorua and in the morning we are having a brunch with her local group of LS members who have a meet up every couple of months. We've both had to keep our traps shut for a whole month as she is bringing me along as a wee surprise for this gathering. I feel very priviledged to be invited into her home, and to spend time with her family and I'm very excited to meet her. I already adore her. She's a bit of a fitness guru and I'm terrified of all the exercise she'll probably make me do......nah not really, I'm looking forward to it, got my trackies and runners, we are going to walk around Mount Maunganui if the weather report is wrong and it doesn't hose down the whole time I'm there. And if it does, who cares! we've got a huge lovely home, big spa bath undercover, and four whole days and nights to get to know each other for real and face to face. Feeling very lucky. And as if that isn't enough, this week we've all managed to put together a pretty damn fine plan for the first weekend in October where about 30 LS members from all over NZ are congregating in Wellington, staying mostly in the same accommodation, just about booked the place right out, in Lyall Bay, and will spend the weekend putting faces and real names to each other after many moons of giving and recieving amazing support, knowledge and humour on the website. All these people feel like real friends, we all really care about each other, so it's going to be a beautiful thing to take it that next step and make it all in the flesh real. We're planning a shared lunch with Mrs D for the Saturday, and my other blogging mate Colourful1 has offered up her home as a venue for this, which will be so cool and make it so much more casual and relaxed than the formaility of a restaurant, which just doesn't work with 30 odd people! Pun intended.  She's even lending us a car!  What a woman!  So.....after a fairly boring long cold lonely winter things are revving up, and I am finding my community expanding in this life changing sober gig I'm on. Bring it on I say......"getting better all the time".......rock n roll .........

Ooops I actually wrote this on the plane a couple of days ago and been having such a good time I forgot to post it......