Christchurch

After leaving our bus parked up at our friend's house on the 20th December, one of their friends, Bill, who is a close neighbour, kindly drove us to the airport from where we flew to Tauranga for the week over Christmas. Great to be with family - we stayed with my daughter - and caught  up with friends again.

On returning to Christchurch, where we are finding Uber a great way to get from A to B, we stayed parked at Helen & Bill's old house for another 2 nights while we did some local exploring. The city and surrounding streets seemed exceedingly quiet which made it easy to bike everywhere. On the Friday we found our way to the cycle path ( love google maps) which runs along the railway line through huge Hagley Park with its lakes and where we never realised there was a golf course, into the city, parking our bikes behind the earthquake damaged Cathedral before taking the tram tour around the city to orientate ourselves. We couldn't believe the number of people we saw riding E scooters - we guess most of them were hired.

Not many people about at all though and most seemed to be tourists. We wandered through the central city which is still very much in restoration mode although we can visualise it being amazing in another 10 years. The eye-catching Art Gallery with it's huge facade of glass panes (no doubt a window cleaners nightmare!) was great to visit as was their big interesting Museum. We ran out of time to see things properly there so will return when we go back to Christchurch.

We had arranged to meet up with Crunch, an old friend of mine from Dunedin university days, at his newly built house about a 20 minute cycle ride from our bus for drinks before dinner. A good catch up. We all had dinner at the local Merivale Pub where we also met some of Crunches regular drinking mates. Then it was back on the road on our lampless bikes before dark descended.

We feel there are more things to see, more cycle paths to ride and many more golf courses to play in Christchurch so we will return but for now we need to meet up with friends from Ohope, who are also travelling in their motorhome, in Ashburton on the 30th. So on Saturday  29th we started heading south, turning inland midway to Ashburton to play golf at the country course of Greendale.