Holiday Trip

On the ninth day of our big trip, we drove from Invercargill to Te Anau. To drive straight there would have taken only a couple of hours, so we decided to take a longer route and see more sights. W went west and a little south, and stumbled across a historical museum in Riverton. Because it was raining, we decided to spend part of our day there—it was dry inside! The museum was very interesting. Our tour started with a movie about the Maori and the first white settlers in the area, and then we spent time exploring the wonderful exhibits. Someone noticed this poster, showing gems that can be picked up at a nearby beach, and Esther took a picture of it. The boys enjoyed the room with all the rocks! I liked the historical exhibits better, but this room was quite interesting, too.

We found Gemstone Beach on the map, so we decided to stop there. It was drizzling, but not too hard. The group of people in the center of this picture are our children. They figured that the creek might be a good place to find gems.

This is what the beach looked like. Most of these stones are about 1/2-3/4 inch in diameter. Such a variety! I don’t think we found anything too valuable. We found a lot of jasper, and some that may have been jade, and a lot of others that were just plain beautiful. We filled a 2-quart bucket with them to bring home. They are still sitting in that bucket, except for a few that I put in a quart jar to weight it down so it wouldn’t spill when I put sunflowers in it.

I was quite amused when I noticed “Windswept Trees” on the map! Yes, there were windswept trees—but not more than other places along the coast!

Here are some of the windswept trees.

Shortly after our visit to Gemstone Beach, where we ate our picnic lunch, we turned north and drove for a couple of hours to Te Anau. I would love to see what the area is really like; it was very cloudy and we couldn’t see the mountains that I’m sure were towering over us.

We saw a sign for a historic bridge, so decided on the spur of the moment to stop. That’s one thing I enjoyed about this trip. Most days, we had enough time that we could stop when we wanted to see something. We planned the trip so that, except for the last two days, we never drove more than 2-3 hours a day. This bridge was fun to walk across.

Simon standing on the bridge cables.

Simon found a rope swing down by the river, and gave the little ones some rides on it.

We saw a lot of farming!

When Miss Joy fell asleep, we decided not to stop for awhile—and then came around a curve and saw this area, with a pull-off for photos. We  stopped for about a minute to enjoy the scene.

I think this is Manapouri. I was intrigued by the mountain sticking up in the middle of this picture.

I was also amused by the name on this sign.

We spent most of our day in the Catlins. There was so much to see! Such beautiful scenery. The sun even came out, making the world even more beautiful. This is very near the southernmost point of the South Island.

Can you guess which direction the prevailing winds come from?Those mountains off in the far distance are Stewart Island. For some reason, I had never realized that Stewart Island was visible from the mainland, so it was a surprise to be able to see it.

We stopped for a few minutes near Fortrose. In the mouth of a river there, you can see a shipwreck at low tide. We were an hour or so too late to see that, but the cliffs were spectacular!

Stewart Island

Miss Joy was thrilled to find a puddle! It was the first real fun she had in days. She was quite sad when we took her away from it to move on; she was getting very tired of being in the van in her carseat.

These shags were on a tiny ledge partway down the cliff.

I don’t remember where this was! It had to be near Bluff.

There were interesting murals on several buildings in Bluff.

We saw the famous sign at the tip of Bluff, but there were no parking places nearby, and there were a lot of people around, so we just drove by and went elsewhere.

Instead of taking our picture by the most famous sign in Bluff, we went back to this sculpture and took some pictures.

Then, we drove up to the Bluff Lookout. I stayed at the van for awhile to feed Miss Joy. There are some of my children at the top! Esther took the pictures below from up there; I climbed up when the baby was finished, but didn’t take any pictures.

Stewart Island

The aluminium smelter is in the center of this picture.

And, that was Day 8 of our trip! We spent the night with some friends just north of Invercargill.

Our second stop, on the day we drove through the Catlins, was at Curio Bay. The friends with whom we stayed the night before told us that we would be able to see a petrified forest if we got there at low tide, so we timed our day in order to reach there then. Mr. Imagination found this shrimp soon after we got down onto the rocks. We really enjoyed seeing rock pools again! The ones we used to explore in Kaikoura were destroyed in the earthquake, so we haven’t been able to explore them for a long time.

This bay really reminded us of the Kaikoura Peninsula. It had pretty much the same type of rocks, and rock pools everywhere.

We soon started finding petrified trees! Some were laying down, like this one.

Some seemed to have charred wood.

Some were stumps sticking up.

There was even bull kelp, like in Kaikoura!

This natural bridge was fun!

Another horizontal log.

These swirls in the side of the cliff were fascinating.

Mr. Sweetie found this crab.

We were also fascinated with the layers in the cliff.After exploring the rocks for awhile , we went back to the vans and had a picnic.

We passed this beautiful estuary right after we left Curio Bay.

Day 5 of our trip was New Year’s Day. We had a leisurely morning with our friends in Twizel, including a late breakfast eaten on the lawn in the warm sunshine (little did we know that was almost the last sunshine we would see for a week!), and then got on our way down the road sometime around noon. We headed south; our goal was to reach the home of other friends in Dunedin. Up until this point, we were retracing routes we had driven other times, but this day everything was new. We drove through a lot of very dry country, broken with lakes here and there that stretched for miles along the road; I am guessing they were all man-made, for generating electricity.

See those clouds coming in? The first hour or two that we were on the road the weather was nice. It was cloudy, but that kept it from being too hot. Then, the heavens opened, and it started pouring! When we finally stopped to eat lunch (around 3:00), it was pouring so hard that we pulled into an empty carpark and pulled the vans up so that the sliding doors were facing each other. Esther and I made sandwiches in our van and then radioed to the other van to open a window so we could pass the plates through. We were so fogged up inside that we couldn’t see each other, but if we opened a window we got drenched quickly!

This was one of the few times that Little Miss rode in our van. The girls enjoyed reading books together.

We saw a sign for the Aviemore Hydro Station and made a quick decision to have a look. First, we crossed the river on the road that goes over the dam, and had a look down from the top.

Then, we drove back across. See the tracks on the sides of the road? It looked like a crane goes on those, and can open the trapdoors in the middle, probably for servicing the power plant.

Then, we looked at the power station from the bottom.

This was a very interesting feature. A fish ladder led to a spawning stream—a man-made channel duplicating the conditions in the wild in which trout lay their eggs. The spawning stream doubles back on itself; it’s apparently a kilometer long altogether.

I grabbed this photo of a ram in the paddock beside the drive down to the power station. My boys saw me taking the photo and called on the radio to inform me that it was a merino. I was impressed by the horns!

An interesting planting of trees we saw on a hillside, after it started raining.

One thing I really wanted to see was the Moeraki Boulders. It was drizzling, but not hard, so we stopped when we reached them, and walked about 10 minutes down the beach to see the famous sight.

These boulders are concretions, formed by something rolling around in sediments and building up layer after layer.

Mr. Sweetie

Miss Joy

Simon

Simon, me, Mr. Sweetie, Elijah

Mr. Diligence, Mr. Sweetie and Little Miss

Then, it started raining harder, and we were already late for tea with our friends in Dunedin, so we hurried back to the vans as fast as we could.