Moon over Martinborough

Having established that both Rick and I loved the property, there remained two hurdles to pass before we could really consider moving out to the middle of nowhere. The first was the train commute.

The train at Featherston station - Image from Rimutaka Incline Railway Heritage Trust

We found accommodation in Martinborough mid-week so that we could actually experience the commute to work back in Wellington, just to see how bad it was.

For two nights we stayed in a refurbished old house built in the style Kiwis call a ‘villa’ – which isn’t an Italian mansion with a courtyard but a quaint, wood-clad bungalow dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. It had a gorgeous garden and was adjacent to some vineyards.

Right away we learned that nights in the country are different. They are pitch black and intensely quiet, as though the darkness itself were a physical substance muffling sound, like fog. That first night we slept more soundly than we had in years.

So we were doubly surprised to be woken in the early hours of the morning by a low humming sound.

Strange noise

The noise seemed to come out of the darkness in all directions.  Then came such a loud, vibrating whir that it seemed a UFO was hovering directly over the house. In my half-sleep, I was certain we’d been targeted for alien abduction.

Only later did we learn that the initial low hum was from the giant fans standing solitary in the vineyards, blowing to keep the frost off the vines. It was September then, the beginning of spring, but the night had been incredibly cold.

The loud hovering thing was not a UFO but a helicopter, flying low over the vines in the darkness in order to fight the frost with wind. Late frosts can cause serious damage to the tender shoots of spring vines, and it can spell disaster for the winemakers of Martinborough.

After learning what those noises were, we were grateful that the property we were considering buying wasn’t adjacent to any vineyards.

The commute

The commute itself was not a problem. It’s a 20 minute drive to Featherston and then a 55 minute train ride from there. The train tracks go under the Rimutaka mountains rather than over them. You can read or sleep or listen to podcasts.

Many Kiwis are horrified to think of anybody traveling for over an hour to work. But Rick and I had grown used to long commutes in Chicago and Tokyo. The key difference was that in those cities you’d travel for an hour to get home from work and still be in the middle of urban sprawl. Here that same commute would take us from the central city to the heart of paradise. Not a bad deal, we thought.

So only one hurdle remained. One thing stood between me and living in paradise with all those beautiful olive trees: the horrible Rimutaka hill road itself.

The Hill Road

In my two years in Wellington at that point, I’d been over that road a handful of times but I’d always refused to drive it. It was all I could do to be a passenger.

But now Rick and I were seriously considering moving to Martinborough, and I didn’t want to live in a place I couldn’t drive to. Of course, I could avoid the daily drive to work by taking the train, but there would undoubtedly be times I’d need to drive into Wellington. My friends are there. The theatres and museums are there. The city is there.

If we were going to live in Martinborough, I had to conquer that awful road. I had to face the blind turns, the high winds, and all those sheer drop-offs that threatened to swallow me whole. I had to drive that road myself.

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Find out what happens next in: Conquering the road that scared me

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Commute, New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.