Monday, September 6, 2010

South Island Adventures Part 6: Christchurch, Wellington

Our last stop in Christchurch was Willowbank Reserve.  It was a zoo type place that had wallobies (?), long finned eels, and a bunch of other native animals.  The only difference with this place was ... there were no cages between us and the animals.  We walked through a door into each exhibit, and the animals were walking, flying, and crawling all around us!  It was so cool!  We saw some real kiwis here too!

We flew into Wellington on Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning got frantic calls from our parents at 7 am in the morning asking if we were okay.  We just missed the 7.1 earthquake, and were so thankful.  We saw pictures of the damage and some of the streets we had parked on were covered in rubble and some of the buildings we walked past had collapsed.  Close call, but thankfully, we're safe!

Wellington was pretty fun.  Visited Te Papa museum.  It was huge with 4 floors of exhibits, including one for the collosal squid, the largest squid ever! DAD: how would you like to spear one of those?? I think it'd probably eat you.  Its HUGE!!! We went up on the cable car and walked around the gardens for a bit.  Pretty boring, haha!  Logan has been dying to go to the Weta Cave.  Its a store made for Weta, which is a company that makes the props for movies such as Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Avatar and a few others.  It was pretty amazing.  We saw a bunch of different collectibles, props from familiar movies, and watched a cool film on the actual factory.  Logan bought a TinTin book because "it's a collectors item and will be worth a lot of money someday." haha!

Our trip was AWESOME!  Definitely a success.  We got pretty attached to our Jucy camper by the end, and it was hard saying goodbye.  I promised you I'd tell you our total mileage, so here it is ... 2,884.5 kilometers = 1,800 miles!  And, we did all of that in 11 days :) Logan did a great job driving.  Now its back to school, and we've got lots of work to do!

Here's a map of everywhere we drove.  Follow the orange line to retrace our steps!

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