We departed Queenstown and headed northeast to our final city, Christchurch. Along the way we caught sight of Mt. Cook, New Zealand's tallest peak. We shot some pictures from a visitor's center on a large lake, which had a very unusual turquoise color to it.
Made it to Christchurch after an uneventful drive, and checked into our hotel, a very English looking affair. Went for a walk and found the place very quiet, but it was a Saturday afternoon.
Next day we visited the New Zealand Air Force Museum and took the "Restoration Tour". This is really an excellent air museum if you happen to be into that stuff. We got to go into the restoration workshops and look over their latest projects, which included a P-40, which is one of my favorites! They also had a Spitfire cockpit which I had to try out!
Went to the International Antarctic center, but tours were very expensive and we didn't see anything in the description that interested us too much, so we passed. Shelly did find a nice Kiwi charm in the gift shop, so it wasn't a complete waste of time! It's actually interesting to see what is here to support the Antarctic research, this is the jumping off point for most support flights to the pole.
We got back to the hotel, and then walked to the center of town. We saw gondolas on the river. Riding in these is called "punting", and you can take short cruises around the central city and park. We checked out a large open air market, then visited the Cantebury museum. This is a general purpose museum with a variety of themes. One was Antarctic exploration, and that was very interesting. They even had a sled from Admunsen's expedition.
Next day, we hit the vast Botanical Gardens and the town center. Shelly seems to have enjoyed these quite a lot, and she took lots of photos. I'll have to post them in a separate entry. We spent spent most of the morning there, then entered the central business district around midday.
Walking around, we came to the central pedestrian mall which had lots of open space and many food vendors. We grabbed a quick lunch of German style sausage and walked some more. There was a large scale chess board set up with people playing. you have to walk around the board and pick up your piece and walk it to the next space to make your move. Could be good exercise!
Click here for Christchurch
Tuesday morning, and it was time to leave New Zealand! We dropped off the car rental, then were shuttled to the airport and caught our connecting flight to Auckland. Flew out of Auckland for L.A.late Tuesday morning, and arrived in L.A. on Tuesday morning! (Thanks to the international dateline). Flew up to SFO, then took BART to Richmond and then caught the AMTRACK Capital Corridor train to Sacramento, then connected with the AMTRACK bus to Rocklin. Our son Ryan picked us up and we got home after about 32 hours of travel!
We slept pretty good that night!
What a trip, in 5 weeks we had flown, sailed on ferries and charter boats, rode trains, cabs, cable cars, drove rental cars, swam, and walked and walked and walked. I can't guess what our mileage totaled...By my count, we took 1578 photos! We'll be sorting through those for years!
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