Rough and Tumble Bush Lodge

A year and a half ago I made contact again with a dear friend I went to school with. And I mean primary school, so it was a loooong time ago.

Susan Cook was part of a small group of children that I found myself in at St Martins Primary School in Christchurch, and we all became fairly close-knit during the two years before high school due to the fact that we were moved up a year and arrived en masse in Form 2 having bypassed Form 1. I imagine this was something of an experiment in education for the early 1980s, but it worked really well and we all survived. I remember sitting in a group in Mr Kennedy's class, scared of all the big Form 2 kids who knew More Stuff than we did. Turns out we were okay after all. Several of us still keep in contact sporadically, mainly encouraged by Roger Dennis who somehow manages to keep in contact with lots of people. Go Rog.

Nowadays, Susan and her other half Marion 'Weasel' Boatwright are now running the Rough and Tumble Bush Lodge on the west coast of the South Island, New Zealand, and it looks absolutely brilliant. The website is a great read, with lovely pictures and interesting information. The brief story of how they developed the Lodge is worth a read - on previous incarnations of the website they had a much longer version complete with in-progress photos of the building. What I would give for a weekend there!