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Published: January 29th 2011
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Any day was likely to struggle to live up to yesterday, and, as we packed up our tent and left Te Anau, I couldn’t help but feel we should maybe have spent another day there, we never really got to explore the town that much, not that there was a lot of it, but, with the clouds gathering, we packed up the tent, had breakfast and hit the road. Nothing really of note on the drive down, there was some sunlight breaking through the clouds which lit up the mountains at one point but the more we drove the greyer it got until, literally as we passed the sign welcoming us to Invercargill, the rain started Not too heavy, but just enough to ensure you needed the windscreen wipers on, and for us to question our intention of camping..Its been quite windy as well today and wind and rain equal pretty miserable camping and, as Helen has been feeling a bit rough today, we explored options in terms of accommodation. We had the option of a $65 lodge but, having got to the site, it was $15 each to camp and so we decided to brave it. We stopped at the
Top10 site to see how it was, and it was quite a way out of town, and raining hard when we arrived so we didn’t fancy putting up the tent then, so we went on to visit bluff, which was somewhere I had wanted to see , and it was suitably windswept and wet, and the car smoked quite alarmingly when we finally made it to the top of the hill where the look out was! A woman passing by commented that her Legacy used to do the same when going up steep hills, but Julia (as we have named her) certainly seems to be struggling with the hills and I do worry the smoke is coming from the automatic clutch and she’s going to conk out, especially as we are currently just about as far away from the North Island as its possible to be, over 1000km to get to Picton from here! While we were in Bluff we also went to see the maritime museum, which was just $2 each entry, and was actually really good! They had loads of bits and pieces related to ships, and even had a surface to air missile and torpedos! As well
as that there was a small oyster boat outside which you could climb down into and see the engine room. We spent a very pleasant hour there, before heading back into town to try and find something else to do! We went to the Isite to get some info about what to do here, and, to our disappointment, everywhere seemed to be shut!! The glow in the dark crazy golf isn’t open until Thursday, the water tower is open tomorrow evening, and, other than the velodrome, there was nothing happening! Even the bloke who shows you around his house where he has around 6000 tin cans stuck to his ceiling wasn’t in! We tried to go to the hospite shop and that had shut (thankfully the bakery next door was open! ☺ and so we were feeling a bit miserable until we remembered they’d said at the ISite there was cycling on at the velodrome…so we headed along to check it out. Neither of us had been to a velodrome before, so we went to take a look mid afternoon and, after chatting with the woman there, it turns out you can turn up and have a go, so, for
$10 each, we are going along tomorrow at noon for our first track session!!! We also found out that the glow in the dark golf is next open Thursday, and Wednesday night they open the water tower for visitors, so, from having nothing to do, it seems we might need a second night!! After we’d been to the velodrome, we found out the racing started at 18:30, so we had a couple of hours to kill, so we went off on an adventure, with Helen navigating…..and she took me to the beach, famous locally, where you can drive on the sand, so that was pretty good fun!! I was gentle with the poor car, but it was fun driving along the sand! We then headed to a little parking spot by a river and also the head of a walkway/cycle path, which seemed to be well used by both runners and cyclists, and then we drove around town for a bit before heading back to the velodrome. It was superb, it was the Southlands competition, loads of different categories of races, and, in all, we watched about 2.5 hours of racing, through from under 15s right through to masters. Really
good competition, some excellent close races, and I was able to wander around and get some photos I was really pleased with. From there, Helen was craving KFC so we went there for dinner before heading back to the camp site, where I had another 500 odd photos to sift through and process, before we headed to bed, with me trying to see if I can persuade Helen to spend a second night in the town we thought was closed and completely dead when we first got here!new ze
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julia
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car
should i worry that you have named the car julia !!!