Well day 2 started off by having a sleep in till 8 and we were met with a rather chilly 2 degrees and a heavy frost over the ground and playground. It was interesting walking over it and hearing a crunching sound and our Son was taking great delight in braking the ice in the frozen puddles. After eating our hot porridge and cleaning up we headed to do the first food shop for the trip at Countdown, or our Woolworths at home. The prices of the fresh food such as fruits seemed to be quite high and I wonder if they have a shortage here as quite a few thing may be out of season. We pack all the groceries away and headed for the Botanical Gardens in Christchurch and parked up in the large car park on the southern side of the river. Now if you have heard the heard the saying "trying to put a round peg in a square hole" that is what it is like trying to park our 7.5 meter mobile command centre anywhere. After shoehorning it into a space I found the front was still 2.5 meters onto the round which was not going to work. While I was pondering my next move, I sent my Wife out on a recognisance mission looking for a more public friendly car park which we found by parking long ways across 4 car parks on the end of a row. I felt like one of those people who park their car in the middle of 2 car parks but it had to be done and it was the safest way.
After having soup and a garlic and herb twist, which we heated up in our oven, we headed over to the lake to watch a local model sailing boat club have a race. The detail on some of the model boats was quite intricate and the racing was very intense with quite a few near misses. After taking quite a few images with both the zoom and wide lenses, we headed over to the gardens for a wonder and made our way to the museum at the northern entrance to the park.
We entered the museum and it was good to get out of the rather cold breeze and into a warm building for a while to defrost. The exhibits are quite interesting which ranged form dinosaurs, science, wars, speedway, post war life, Antarctica and even an Egyptian mummy and was well worth our time to visit. We headed back through the gardens and visited my Wife's favourite part, the daffodils which there was not many of this time of year. I took a picture of her and our Son amongst them which I did 2 years ago when we were last here. We wondered through the park till around 5 and made our way back to the motor home park that we stayed at last night as they have good hot showers and good speed free internet :)
Tomorrow is not good for a west coast run and we have decided to head down the east coast to Oamaru which has a Steam Punk museum, blue eyed penguins, a seal colony and very pretty little harbour that is sheltered from some very rough seas. We have been there 4 times before and it is the birth place of one of our friends. There is a cracker of a restaurant there as well called the Star and Garter and we can recommend it if you are travelling through these parts. We went out for lunch there for Fathers Day in 2016 and it was also close to the 90th birthday of our friends Mother so was a great day and my Parents were also travelling with us so I had my Dad there as well. If we get in to late for lunch we will go there for dinner tomorrow night.
Anyway time to hit the hay and get ready for another day in this great country.
See you tomorrow.