The Demio Shot

A side-effect of funding a book oneself is that it is necessary to be relatively frugal (although parsimony admittedly went out the window when it came to eating our way around New Zealand). Accordingly, when presented with the options for rental cars on our first research trip to Canterbury, we decided that a comically small hatchback (entitled Demio) would suffice.

 Thus began the tradition of the Demio Shot; wherein David would record the increasingly out-of the-way locations that our procession of preposterously tiny cars took us to.

 The covering of long distances in such hatchbacks reminded me of the annual journey of 2 of my co-workers at the large German nursery where I worked for several months in my early 20s. These burly Polish gentleman (resplendent with moustaches that wouldn’t be out of place in the pages of Asterix) traversed almost the entire length of Germany in a Fiat Bambina to work on a seasonal basis, before returning home for the remainder of the year.