It really is a small world.
If I hadn’t known it before, it was brought home to me when I first journeyed to New Zealand. My youngest daughter, Ashley, was going there to study viticulture and oenology (grape-growing and wine-making). Down under, the school year starts in late February, because the seasons are reversed. So that January, Ashley and I made the long flight to spend a month touring around one of the most beautiful countries on earth and getting her settled in school.
January really is summer “down under.” It’s not just the temperature – not like going to, say, Florida. The days are long, and folks are taking their summer vacations. Cooking magazines feature holiday suggestions for picnics on the beach and barbies, a.k.a. barbeques.
Ashley had decided to study winemaking in New Zealand for several reasons. We had a friend in Springfield from New Zealand in the wine business, and knew his family and other New Zealand friends from their visits here, so she’d have a support group. New Zealand’s wine industry is relatively new, but has been receiving worldwide accolades. The only winemaking degree in the U.S. at that time was at the University of California/Davis, and it was almost impossible for out-of-state undergraduates to be admitted.
A bonus was the favorable NZ/US exchange rate. Unfortunately that bonus quickly became a liability: the exchange rate worsened almost immediately after our arrival, and continued to “go south” throughout Ashley’s four years there. New Zealand consists of two large islands, unimaginatively named North and South. We flew into Auckland, a city of one million in the north part of the North Island (the largest city in a country of four million), and stayed with friends for a few days before heading south in a rental car.
The scenery was breathtaking, and we soon tired of exclaiming “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen!” only to repeat ourselves minutes later.
We had many adventures on our trip (not least because of driving on the “wrong” side of the road) and put 7,000 kilometers on our rental car in a month. When not staying with friends, we searched out bed-and-breakfasts.
In a suburb of Wellington, the capital city, on the southern tip of the North Island, we found the nicest bed-and-breakfast of our entire journey. It had a beautiful garden, and our room was thoughtfully furnished with every convenience, including a tin of cookies. We were hungry, and each took one. “What do you think?” Ashley asked. “It’s good, but too short (meaning, it has too much fat/shortening)” I replied, ever the food critic. She agreed.
We settled in, freshened up, and went into the kitchen to chat with our hostess; quickly discovering we had a lot in common. She was in charge of the music curriculum for Wellington schools and loved to cook.
“Do you know who Jo Seagar is?” I asked.
I’d met Seagar – sometimes referred to as the Julia Child of New Zealand – a couple of years earlier when she’d stopped in Springfield to visit some of our NZ friends on her way to a culinary convention in Chicago. Seagar even looks a bit like Child: tall, with a broad face and an outgoing personality. We’d had a fun evening, and my husband, Peter, had helped her the next day with a dental emergency.
“Of course I know who Jo Seager is,” our B&B hostess replied enthusiastically. “She’s wonderful! I have all of her cookbooks. In fact, the cookies in your room are from her latest book. I have to say, though, I was a bit disappointed in them.” She turned to her shelf of cookbooks, pulled one out, opened it to the
