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Christchurch

Orana Park, Again!

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We went to Orana Wildlife Park in Christchurch twice in the past, but it has been a long time. We needed to go to Christchurch to pick my mom up at the airport, so Gayle and I decided to take our younger family (we have four older children and four younger, separated by four years) to the zoo. We spent about five hours walking around enjoying the animals. What makes Orana Park really stand out, though there aren’t very many animals compared to most zoos, is that we got to watch many of the animals being fed. We followed the schedule and saw every feeding for that day.

The meerkats were given eggs for this feeding.

Though the African porcupines normally sleep during the day, they came out eagerly for their dog biscuits!

Baby emus are cute!

When we arrived at the otter enclosure, they were standing up, begging in high-pitched squeaks and whistles for their fish!

All four children watching the ducks on one pond.

I’m not sure what type of birds these were, but they had a nest in the moat around the rhino enclosure.

Everyone’s favorite part of the zoo visit was feeding the giraffe! We were given olive branches, which we held up so the giraffe could strip off the leaves.

This is the baby giraffe–he’s about a year old.

They had fun feeding the turkey and chickens!

The lion feeding is always fun, too. This was the first day since Covid started that the truck was used to feed them. Only staff were on the truck for the trial run, but they plan to start selling tickets to the public again soon. Two of the three lions in the enclosure remembered this, but one didn’t seem to.

Tasmanian devil

We were very close to the rhinos while they ate their special treat: lucerne (alfalfa) hay.

I was talking to one of the zoo volunteers at the rhino enclosure, and happened to notice this nest right above his head. Not sure that was a good place to stand!

The children loved feeding the trout–and the ducks love the trout food! I tried to get a picture of the trout, but my battery ran out right there.

Last Day With Grandma

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No one wanted to go to Christchurch the last day of November. Going to Christchurch meant dropping Grandma off at the airport, and we just weren’t ready for that! The tickets said we had to take her there that day, though, so we did it. We went to church in Waikari that morning, since it is on the way to town. Going between Waikari and the highway, we crossed Weka Pass, which is a low pass through a range of hills. There are some spectacular rock formations in that pass! The last one is called Frog Rock.

Since we had about three hours in town before having to be at the airport, we went to Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, a small zoo. Before entering, we were taking a picture of the children in front of this small building, and a bus driver who was waiting nearly came up and offered to take a picture of all of us! We greatly appreciated it; he said he does it all the time.

There are some beautiful spots along the trail that winds through the park.

See the black swan under the branches?

One special extra we had at Willowbank was when we happened upon a group of keepers releasing three emus into an enclosure. They had just gotten them and were opening the crate when we arrived on the scene. It was pretty funny to see those heads popping up over the edge of the crate, then hiding again. Once the door was open and the keepers were all out of the enclosure, it took a long time for the emus to get up the courage to actually leave the crate that had been their home for three days! We stayed to see one bounce out, but after 10 minutes or so moved on and left the 10 or so keepers to keep watch! This was obviously the event of the day at Willowbank!

Willowbank

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We were able to get tickets to Willowbank Wildlife Reserve for half-price recently, thanks to a tip from a friend.  The tickets were good till the end of June, so we were planning to go sometime before then, but weren’t sure when it would work out.  Gayle didn’t want to take time off work for that, but neither did we want to go on a Saturday because there would likely be a lot of people there.  Then, we ended up needing to go to Christchurch to meet the Vice-Consul from the American Embassy in Auckland when he made a visit to Christchurch, to get the baby’s American paperwork done and apply for his passport.  The appointment was in the early afternoon on a Thursday, and both of us had to be there, so that was our perfect opportunity to take the family to Willowbank!

There were tame eels in a pond at the beginning of the tour, and a woman was spoon-feeding them with a little container of food she bought in the office.  They would crawl partway out of the water onto the step!

Black swan.

Pukeko.

Fallow deer

The woman who had been feeding eels had some bread along, and let our children, as well as her daughter, feed it to the wallabies and ducks.

Monkey Island was fun!

Macaws

This bird would say, “G’day, mate!” when the boys said it to him!

Lemur

Kune-kune pigs

My horse-lover was happy!

Boys looking at antique tractors….

This was supposed to look like a Maori village.  It struck us that it must not be full-sized!  Those houses seemed pretty tiny.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the live kiwis, but we did see a couple of them.

Morepork owl–tiny little thing!

This Has Been an Interesting Week!

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This week has been very full, and I haven’t had any great inspirations for a good post, so here’s a quick look through some pictures Esther took throughout the week.

Sunday morning was a beautiful morning to drive to church–but apparently eggs are not a good choice for Sunday morning breakfast.  I’ve been watching what we eat and how the children react in terms of carsickness (quite an issue when you go through the Hundalees and along the coast!), and the two weeks lately that we’ve had eggs we’ve had a lot of complaints about upset tummies.  The week in between, when we had granola, no one complained.  Anyway, this time the youngest got sick, for the first time, and got you-know-what all over his shirt, pants, and car seat.  We pulled off immediately and cleaned up while the children enjoyed the ocean.  What we didn’t get a picture of was Daddy down at the water, rinsing out the shirt and pants when an extra-large wave drenched him!

Sunday evening after we got home, one boy asked to look up how to make a slingshot, on YouTube.  A magpie has been terrorizing the boys, and drew blood on one the day before–he came in with his hand pressed against his head, and blood streaming down his forehead. It seems to be a juvenile magpie, just having fun.  (The juvenile delinquent of the bird world?)  So, my boys are out to protect their family from this terrorist and a slingshot seemed to be a halfway decent idea.  This was what he came up with, and we had the materials on hand (milk bottle top and balloon; he added duct tape to secure the balloon later):

Monday was a gorgeous day, and my photographer got some beautiful shots of the animals and the views from around the house. This is our landlord’s paddock of wheat and corners of some of our raised beds.

The cow–happy because she can be near one of the calves, even though he isn’t hers.

The hills west of us in the evening; wheat in the foreground.

Tuesday we went to Christchurch for Dead Boring (homeschool writing group).  The younger children were playing at making a garden in the afternoon.  All five of my boys are in this group–can you pick them out?

The family who hosted DB this time live across the street from the Avon River–still beautiful in most places even if sewage gets in it now!  The water level seems a lot higher than before the February earthquake; if I understand right, the bed of the river was pushed up.

The house next door to our friends is unoccupied; the people moved out after the September quake over a year ago.  This crack goes through their yard.

We drove through a section of town that I hadn’t been in since a week before the February quake.  Although a lot has been cleaned up, the destruction is still incredible.  It seems like all the older, beautiful buildings are gone or going, and only the newer, less pretty ones are left.  So sad.

This picture doesn’t show it very well, but the whole house was sort of “wracked”–almost twisted. This entire area is going to be demolished and not rebuilt.

The Grand Chancellor Hotel–tallest building in Christchurch. It’s been leaning since February 22, and now it’s being demolished.Churches, built out of brick or stone, suffered the most.

…And we were glad to get back home again to our peaceful spot in the country, far away from the quakes and the city!

The roses are blooming!  With 40 bushes around the house, and most of them different varieties, we enjoy quite the array of colors.

While I was in town on Tuesday, I bought 30 kilograms of carrots.  I wanted to bottle 20 kg of them for quick additions to soups, so Wednesday I had the boys peel and chop while I read to them.  They did about half that day.  The next day, they got started on the remaining carrots before I even suggested it, and before I knew what was happening they were finished–with no story to listen to!  They were racing to see who could peel and chop five the quickest.  My boys are growing up.

 

Friday we went back to Christchurch because Gayle had a series of appointments with medical professionals to get a paper saying that he does not have tuberculosis.  Hopefully now our permanent residency visa will go through.

So there you have it–the partial story of our week!  I am very thankful that I don’t have to go to town very often, let alone twice in a week!  Glad to have it over with, but I’m also glad we were able to go and attend Dead Boring, get the medical work done, and we even got to have a date while we were there (a dear friend kept the children for a few hours!).  It was also good to be able to stock up on groceries and get fresh produce that we can’t afford up here (I spent nearly $200 on produce this week–but hadn’t bought much of any for six weeks.)