Last Day

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Woke up at Bryony's and we headed for Auckland museum. This is a great place to go to early in your holiday as it gives you a good feel for the country and the history. We spent a couple of hours here, looking at Maori artefacts from all different parts of their history and wandering through more modern history with children's toys from last century (we found Star Wars but they seemed to be sadly lacking in the Superman department). The best bit of the museum is about the volcanoes; there was a mock up living room you would sit in where they showed a modern day news reel as if there was a live volcano eruption. You can see through the patio doors of the living room across the Auckland water line and you experience a volcano erupting, along with the house shaking as it does. Very realistic and scary fun. Speakin of scary fun, there was an interactive section of the museum where you could touch rocks, see live cockroaches (I thought of you Graham!) and so on. Bryony's lovely, sweet,
thoughtful, kind, caring children decided to get me to close my eyes and led me to somewhere, sat me down, and told me to look up. This, I somewhat stupidly did. And saw spiders. I don't think I've shot up so fast in a long time. Even more stupidly I sat down in the same place again and looked to the left, where they assured me there were no spiders. Now I'm not sure if tarantula's technically come under the heading of spiders, but they sure do in my book. I moved faster than a speeding bullet and decided to go and look at shiny rocks instead...

After the museum Bryony and I went for lunch in the Sky Tower. This was very cool. It was a revolving restaurant (which was a tiny bit pricey and a bit posh, but lovely food) with awesome views of the city. We did one whole revolution as we stayed for lunch. It was a bit bizarre seeing just a middle ring of the restaurant revolving, as it felt like it was actually the building the was moving and not me, but it was cool. We went down to the viewing deck where you can walk across glass and look straight down on to the streets below. Now that was an odd feeling. You are seeing your feet suspended in mid-air and your brain just can't seem to cope with the idea that you aren't falling.

After that we got the most gorgeous ice cream on the harbour and took a short boat trip across to Davenport. It's a sleepy enough little place, but looks like it could be fairly lively of an evening. It also has the advantage that I bought a Harley t-shirt with "Harley Davidson New Zealand... No worries" written on it. We wandered around soaking up the last bits of sun we could, before heading back.

Then, suddenly, it was time for the air port. I had just about everything packed in my bags, which was no mean feat, and they came in just under weight. Phew. I met Nana at Auckland airport, where Bryony had kindly dropped me off, and had a minor panic about Nana's baggage. No one could find it from the Gisborne plane. I wandered down the other end of the air port to where my luggage was when I flew up from Gizzy, and, surprise surprise, it was there. Good job someone at the airport knew what we were doing!

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