Home Sweet Home

The very last day of our amazing Road Trip.

I woke on this morning feeling utterly exhausted and a little bit crabby.  I was ready to head home – but our flight was not until late afternoon.

We headed into central city and found a carpark so I could visit Victoria Park. 

I especially wanted to see the two statues here as they relate back to colonial days – currently not a very popular period of our history and I fear that at some stage activists will deface/destroy them.

The first one was a beautiful bronze of Queen Victoria.

The other statue is carved of Carrera marble and is of Captain James Cook.

We thought the New Brighton Pier café might be a nice place to have morning coffee, but when we arrived it was dull and the wind was cold and we decided against the idea.

Instead, we headed out to Lyttelton.  This is the port town associated with Christchurch, and is accessed via a tunnel through the Port Hills.

By driving through the town, heading towards Sumner, a lookout point can be accessed above the Port.  The port is divided into sections – coal, car imports, logging, containers etc. – and we watched one ship being unloaded of soy meal for stock food.

This photo shows the coal area (being imported).

The harbour entrance can be seen here, along with the edge of the logging and container areas.  On the far right are the imported cars, slowly being loaded onto car transporters and taken off to be sold.

We also drove up to the Time Ball Station but that was a disaster.  Our vehicle was much too big to turn around easily in the tiny space available, and after trespassing into someone’s driveway (so we could turn around) we left again!

Back in town, we stopped for a late morning coffee and then headed for the Airport to return our rental car.  It all checked out well, which is always a relief, and we settled down to wait a couple of hours for our plane to be ready – Air New Zealand had changed our flights, so we had longer to wait.

Eventually, at 4.30, we boarded our small plane with a sigh of relief.  We were both tired and just wanted to go home.

Our flight home was not an easy one and I commend the pilot for missing the worst of the thunderstorms that were in our path.  There was a lot of turbulence, making the woman in front of us groan a lot, and the air hostess announced that they had expected this and there were sick-bags at the back of the seat in front of us if needed!

Nearly two hours later we flew into Hamilton, and it was so good to see familiar sights laid out below us.

This was not a holiday we had been on, but a marathon road trip covering just over 2000km in seven days.

We must have been a bit crazy, but, oh, what great memories!

Thanks for coming along with us through this blog 😊

Margaret.