Black Swans

For about the last 6 months I have been planning a suprise for my dear Hubbies birthday. A trip to Auckland for the weekend to see Steely Dan. I had it planned down to the smallest degree. But as usual there was a black swan waiting in the wings.

My eldest son was going to look after the youngest and my middle son was to stay at a friends for the weekend. I was really worried about the oldest and the youngest but figured that the middle one would be OK with his friend.

The day before we went Peter got an email from the bank to say that the password on his credit card had been reset. We did wonder why but the bank said nothing to worry about. Then when I checked Peter's credit card there were a whole lot of payments going through. It took over 4hrs for us to persuade Visa that we were not in the UK and not using the card. Eventually they agreed to stop the card! Now you would think this is what they should have done straight away. Instead they said to check our next statement due in about 4 weeks time and then dispute anything! Moral of this story check your credit card statements closely and often. So with no credit card the trip was going to not be an extravagant trip. But we still decided to continue.

So off we went and had a brill day driving up to Auckland, it took us 9 hrs. We went through Rotarua and stopped in Tirau and Cambridge. I even got to visit Kate Fitzpatrick's shop, I wanted to buy it all.

We arrived at the hotel and settled in, had some room service snacks and a nice bottle of wine. Then lazed around watching TV and chilling. Then the bomb shells started to drop. Our middle son had decided to go Awol with his girlfriend. The poor parents of the friend he should be with were searching everywhere. He was not answering his phone or texts. So that was the end of our weekend. All we could do was sleep off the wine and head for home. No shopping, no hanging around in cafe's, no browsing book shops and most importantly no Steely Dan. What always goes wrong is the thing you least expect, a black swan. Needless to say middle son appeared the next day wondering what all the fuss was about. He knows now.