Interesting people I have met on my wine tours Part 2

Phil runs the Best Auckland Wine Tours that he can think of right now, anyway.


Okay - more interesting wine tour clients ...the envelope please.

The couple from Perth Aus, on their honeymoon.  She was very pale, quiet and frail looking. He was bearded, loud and hearty.  When I picked them up, he told me that she gets travel sick very easily, plus she had been in the rear seat of a bus the day before on an 8 hour Bay of Islands trip and was feeling a tad queasy today, plus she had not had any brekkie.
Fair enough - I sat her up front, and sloooooowly round the bends (practically no bends anyway on the way from the hotel out west).  But she just got worse - so I offered her some ginger tablets that I keep for the nauseous punters ...but she had never been able to swallow pills of any kind.  The  we decided to try to get her to eat something, and went to a local cafe.  All she could face was fresh fruit.  And then she threw up.
In short - I took her to the local A&E, she was seen by a GP, I returned her to the City hotel and the husband decided he wanted to carry on with the tour by himself and leave wifey, green and delirious in the hotel for the day by herself.

The tall, blond baby-faced US Navy guy who came on a tour by himself.  He was funny, friendly, goofy and intelligent - really good company. Liked his wine, and cracked jokes non stop.
Turned out, he was the intelligence officer for a visiting US navy ship.  His job was to fly out, ahead of the ship's visit to Auckland to assess any threat to the ship's security while  it was in dock. I had some of his fellow seamen on a tour when the ship arrived.  They said, 'Yeah he's a nice guy but he's very serious about his job.  We call him Tinfoil.'