1 week Ago By Joanna Wane
They met as strangers in 2003 but through life and death, the surviving members of Outward Bound’s McKenzie Watch have forged an unbreakable bond of friendship. Joanna Wane joined them in Hahei for their 20th annual reunion. Michael Rothery didn’t quite know what to make of it when his wife, Yvonne, packed her bags and went off-grid without him.
When they got married, she was 18 and still living with her parents. In more than 25 years together – bringing up three children and running their own business – the Kāwhia couple had never spent a holiday apart. Maybe she was having a midlife crisis, he worried.
Maybe she was thinking about trading him in. “I thought, ‘What the hell is my wife wanting to go and do this for? And is she going to come back different?’” he says. “That was a bit scary.
” Yvonne, who’d been sponsored on the eight-day Outward Bound course by her local branch of Rural Women NZ, cried on the train all the way to Wellington..
