On Friday we woke up and felt ready to face the day. We had breakfast on the back patio of our AirBnB rental. We got ourselves moving and did a couple of fun things in Christchurch.
The first were the Christchurch botanic gardens, which were glorious. Some of the highlights included various green houses and internal shelters of plants. One held a large set of cacti and succulents that Emma particularly enjoyed. There was even an outdoor garden exhibit on "low-water" garden setups that required relatively little attention under some circumstances. They also had a nice outdoor rose garden that we walked through and a water garden. And now the requisite photos, including both beautiful photos of flowers taken by Emma and beautiful photos of Emma by flowers!
Christchurch botanic gardens
Christchurch botanic gardens, Dahlia flower beds
Christchurch botanic gardens, succulent house
Christchurch botanic gardens, roses
The second was the Christchurch Art Gallery. One of the great things about NZ is that all of the art galleries are free. They may have a temporary traveling exhibit that costs money, but our experience was that the bulk of the institution was free to explore. Christchurch had some wonderful art, including one thing in particular- an interactive "energy" exhibit where a gallery goer stands and directs a camera flying over and around a giant pulsing ball of energy. Created some great photos! Which we will put below, since you need to see more photos.
Emma as conductor
After a brief stop for more supplies we headed on Highway 7 through the Lewis Pass, our first east to west drive in NZ.
Typical of the drive to St. Arnaud and much of NZ:
open empty road and beautiful view
Emma's slow motion video giving you a sense of the NZ country side. COWS!
We ended up at the Alpine Lodge in St. Arnaud, where we made a pasta dish in the backpacker's kitchen, that highlighted when a sick backpacker vomited into one of the kitchen sinks as we sat down to eat, and another backpacker mistaking our pasta pot for their own and digging in before realizing their mistake :). We had lots of good conversations and did some planning over dinner, which felt good.
No comments:
Post a Comment