They came.  They Gumped.  They conquered.

That’s right, folks, your favorite Kiwi flatmates reunited this past weekend right here on the good old OBX!

(Townes was not one of our Kiwi flatmates, but we sure love him a lot.)

You may remember Mikaela from, well, my entire semester in New Zealand, and from our pit stop in St. Michaels last September while sailing the Chesapeake Bay.  This past weekend, she made the drive down from Maryland to visit for a few days.  The beach offered up its best possible weather as a welcome and gave us a gorgeous sunny Saturday to take advantage of.  We walked for miles along Bay Drive, catching up on the past few months and talking about the weird novelty of adult life.  We also waited for Irie while he attacked a crab pot on the docks, and saw a lady walking her bird.  Yes, you read that correctly.  She was carrying her parakeet in a meshed-in baby carrier on her front.  And it was talking.  We thought it was an actual baby at the time, but the lady turned out to be our waitress when we went to Mama Kwan’s for dinner that night, and she recognized us and cleared up the whole bird-walking confusion.  So that was new.

The good weather luck completely ran out by Sunday, which was gray and rainy and generally not lovely.  Fortunately, Mikaela and I rather enjoy drinking tea and sitting in two couches pushed together, so it worked out all right in the end.  But before we settled in, I took Mikaela to the wondrous occurrence that is Chilli Peppers brunch, and she went on a bike ride while I took care of some maid of honor duties for Sara’s upcoming bridal shower.  We also met Paul, Susannah, and Townes for coffee and catch-up at Front Porch, which mostly turned into Townes teaching us how to play iPhone games.

Turns out I’m pretty bad at just about every game there is.  And TR is awesome.  He was also thrilled to see “the girl who tied knots with me on the sailboat” again!  Anyway, it was fun to show Mikaela where I work and spend so much of my time here.  It was like two really different parts of my life coming together!  Magical worlds collide.

And then… ladies and gentlemen, the Gump was resurrected:

Please ignore the fact that my jeans are tucked into my tramping socks.  I had boots on before that and when I took them off it was really comfortable.

Anyway, a few episodes of Flight of the Conchords and a few hours of reading (we both happened to be reading the third book in the Hunger Games series) later and we’d successfully whiled away a good part of the evening in the Gump.  What can I say?  We’re good at Lazy Sunday.  We can often be found watching movies and snack attacking.  Somehow we forgot to watch any of the Superbowl at all, but we wouldn’t have been able to see the TV over the side of the Gump anyway!  One little man was pretty jealous:

What a sweet baby.  He love love loved Mikaela.

After a final mug of tea, it was time to say goodnight.  (I love how much tea I drink when Mikaela’s around.  It reminds me of New Zealand.)  I was up at 4:30am the next morning to open the shop, but Mik stopped by and hung out for a bit on her way out of town.

Now that we’ve gotten together twice while in our current Maryland/North Carolina arrangement, we’ve realized how short the five-hour trip is!  We definitely want to make it happen again, but we’re hoping our next trip will be to Boston to visit Chelsea.  It would be so cool to have three of the O119 mates together again… and I’m still holding out hope that we’ll plan a reunion with all five of us sometime in the not-too-distant future!  Now THAT would be crazytown.

Just a typical day in flat O119.

So, that wraps up this visit, but we’ll be back.  You can’t keep us apart for long!