Vowel towns

February 4 - We drove to Oamaru yesterday - gorgeous day with blue sky, not a cloud in sight and not a breath of wind. We drove past a beautiful lake which was absolutely flat, so there were some lovely reflections of the mountains to take photographs of! Oamaru is notable for its lovely old buildings and there is a thriving historic precinct where all the shop keepers dress in period costume as they demonstrate their trades e.g. book binding, weaving, stone carving. Our campground was within easy walking distance of the town through the botanic gardens - lots more photographic opportunities! John found a hardware store to buy some screen material and duct tape (hurray for duct tape!) so that he could manufacture screens for our van windows (part of our beef with the company was that there were screens on the little windows but not the big ones even though the fittings were there). We have now pretty much fixed up everything that was wrong with the van and have had some very frustrating phone calls and e-mails with the customer service person from the company who really doesn’t seem to give a damn. However, we won’t go there ………
February 5 - The only thing that we have booked in New Zealand is a night on a boat on Doubtful Sound on February 15, and I rather over-estimated the amount of time we would need to get there. I tried to change the day so that we could go earlier, but the cruises get booked up months in advance so we are stuck with the dates I originally booked. So we are dragging our heels a bit as we have 8 days to drive about 500 km. We left Oamaru this morning and drove to see the Moeraki Boulders - ancient concretions on one particular part of the beach. They look like huge marbles and are a tourist “must”. I had also read about (and been told about) a restaurant in Moeraki called Fleur’s Place, owned, mysteriously, by someone called Fleur. And the food really did live up to the reputation. We have been sharing meals almost from day 1 of our trip, but we let ourselves go here and although we shared the asparagus soup and fresh grouper, we splurged and had a whole dessert each. Absolutely amazing. We lumbered back to the van and drove a few more miles to a town called Waikouaiti (see why I called this entry “vowel towns”?) which is a blob on the map with nothing going on. The campsite is tiny and has some very interesting people in it (apart from us, of course!), the beach is gorgeous (but too cold to swim) and we are going to stay here for a couple of days and veg. John is actually threatening to look at some of his photos which now must number over 7,000 to start organizing them. I’m not sure that that is a reasonable expectation in this lifetime, but it would be good to start.
As we head off to the south coast we will be out of internet reach for a while so I’m not sure when the next blog will appear. But fear not, we haven’t dropped off the edge of the world and will be back …..