Not such a good Christmas/New Year holiday this year, with a little too much rain and little a too much wind for a few people. Our campers that did brave the wet weather found it was not as cold as it looked and their kids loved it, they rode their bikes through the puddles, made mud slides down the terrace to the reserve.   The washing machines and dryers were in frequent use but most people still had a smile on their face.

The new playground (low ropes course) was very popular with the younger campers, but the river is the biggy when it is warm enough, (which is sometimes when it is raining). When I went down to take photos of happy campers for our Facebook page in the afternoon, the camp was empty because they were all at the river. It is great to see so many young children camping with their families, there were groups of 4-5 families all camping together and most of the children were under 10. A few of our campers caught up with people who had camped last year and were back at the same time these holidays, then they have booked again for next holidays. We had good numbers staying in our park for the whole of January, particularly at the weekends when the weather was so nice. People are frequently surprised by how much warmer it is here than in Christchurch or even Oxford! Our 4.00pm check out is very popular with people coming for a weekend.

Now we are getting more international travellers and people that do not have to worry about school holidays, it is great to see them come for a night and end up staying longer because they really like the park and the atmosphere. Some of our international people who arrive for their last night say they wish they had come earlier and stayed longer. Then we have the ones who stay on their first night and come back for their last night at well.

A number of groups have booked our bunkhouse complex for this year; we are having a wedding, retreats, social functions and family reunions. Then at Easter our whole camp is booked out by the New Zealand National Rover Scouts for their annual Rover Moot. We will have between 150 and 200 young adults from New Zealand and Australia staying, playing and working in and around Oxford for the long weekend. We are really looking forward to that. Sorry to those who would have liked to have come out for Easter but we still have lots of spaces for ANZAC weekend and all the other ordinary weekends, remember we are only 45 minutes to 1 hour from Christchurch.