For some it will have been 50 years since they had a look around Kurow.
The small town of about 400 in the Waitaki Valley would fill with about 200 extra, but familiar, faces from March 4 to 6 for the Kurow Muster, John Currie, one of the organisers, said.
Bus tours on the Saturday would head out through the Lake Waitaki power station, up the Hakataramea Valley to the Kurow Winery, but the muster was a "general reunion'' for anyone who had been a part of the wider Kurow community and wanted to reconnect.
"Time goes on and you wish you'd met all those people and had a talk to them again, you know?'' Mr Currie (70) said.
People had left the valley and "natural attrition'' was becoming an issue.
Mr Currie and his sister, Libby Johnston, had been speaking about the reunion for the past five years and when their brother, Dave Currie, died they knew it was time to make the muster happen.
"My brother died two and a-half years ago, and he was one of the ones, also, that wanted to get this together and we just never did anything about it,'' Mr Currie said.
"And then when he went we just went, 'Hey, we are going to have to do this, and do this now'.''
They decided to cast their net wider.
Anyone who had lived, worked or gone to school in the area, from Aviemore to Otekaieke and Hakataramea Valley to Mt Parker - anyone who was once a part of the Kurow community - had the chance to register.
Registrations are now closed and the muster is only five weeks away.
Families who lived at Waitaki Village or Aviemore in the "old electricity department'' were returning, as were farming families that had sold their farms and left.
Mr Currie moved to Kurow from Oamaru when he was 2 years old; his parents bought a sheep farm there.
"But the first three years all the money they made was off the rabbits, because there was no chance of making money off the sheep.
"They were getting over 1000 rabbits a day.''
"It was many years before [his father] was able to buy himself a motorcar, and things like that. We had no power at our place when we first went there.''
But with "catching up and reminiscing'' on the official itinerary there would be plenty of stories at the muster.
The response had been great, too, from those who still lived in Kurow.
"We've got a very good community,'' Mr Currie said.
He said he hoped the first Kurow Muster would not be the last, and that in another five years someone else might want to "give it a go''.
