Cinders On Ice - part 3 (Wellington - Jul 2008)

Wellington
We arrived at the hotel in Wellington for 14:00 and had to be at the theatre for 18:00 for a 4 hour pre-rig. We weren't supposed to be in today, but management was having a panic about the show fitting up in two days, well given how long it took to get it out and all the problems with flying the wonky set you can see why.

I had got up at 11am on Sun, was working till 9am on Mon, had a couple of hours sleep on a plane, a bus, and a few hour in the new hotel before heading in for 6pm. By 11pm I was in one of those quiet, contained moods - the ones that you can manage as long as no one says anything silly, like "I don't know what all the fuss is about". However we were all shattered, so we kept the banter light and gave each other space.

Getting the set up in Wellington wasn't so bad, at least we had done it once. It still flew like a bag of shite and was a pain in the arse, but no worse than we expected. The ice rink was another mater.

To have an ice rink you need to keep the water frozen. To keep the water frozen you have lots of tiny little pipes that run at the bottom of a kinda pond liner. Those pipes have antifreeze, glycol, running around at -8 to -15 depending on what we need (-15 to build ice, -8 for skating). We would finish the first day of the get-in by laying the ice-rink mat (the tiny tubes) so that overnight our ice technicians could build up the ice mm by mm.

Overnight a pipe ruptured and the glycol, under pressure, spread rapidly. (When we first come up to pressure we watch carefully for bursts in the mat, but once we have been up to pressure for a bit we kinda assume it all good). However the mat spring a leek, which from above looked tiny, but a lot of glycol spread rapidly. It was found and plugged, but the full extent of the leak wasn't realised.

We came back in the morning to slush and as time progressed things got no better. By lunchtime we were talking the slush out, washing the rink and all our equipment down and preparing to start all over again. There was just too much glycol mixed in with the water for it ever to freeze. The evenings show was cancelled and we made the national news.

The next evening we had a show and by the end of the week we were packing it all way, however it was all being broken down to air-freight on pallets. We split the get out up - Bob and I went home after the first half hour of the out and came back in the morning. The rest of our team worked overnight with one team of locals getting the ice rink out. When Bob and I returned the ice rink gone and they had made a small start on the set.

We took over and with a fresh team of local staff got the set down, broken up and onto the air-freight pallets. Bob was calling the shots and I was mostly scribbling the pack list (when you have nine massive piles of set on wheels and it all looks the same knowing exactly what is on pallet one of 5 is kinda good) and making sure all the bits that had to go in the rigging cases was put away properly so we made things as easy for ourselves as possible.

The rest of our team came back in that afternoon, by which point we were finishing off getting the set palleted and loaded onto the wagons. Within two hours we were all done and were sharing a beer with the local guys in the dock. Beer always tastes better after a lot of hard work.

We weren't flying the following afternoon so made the most of our remaining afternoon and evening. As we were heading from one bar to another we bumped into some of the guys from the theatre we had been in all that week and randomly ended up in the crew room at the sister theatre to the one we had been in. A few more beers, some random bloke on a guitar and a smoke and the world was looking rosy and the sky was getting light.

The next day we flew to Melbourne.