Travel, Christchurch, Akaroa

Well, the first day is in the books. A word of advice: if you can avoid 13-hour flights, do so at all costs. The staff of Air New Zealand was friendly, the food was decent, some of drinks were free, and the safety video was done by some of the ladies from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, but that is just way too much time to be cooped up in one space. I managed about 2.5 hours of crappy sleep while staying up until about 3am PST in an attempt to help me adjust to New Zealand time, and that’s all that I had until a bit after 11 last night.

So that's how you wear a seatbelt.  Thanks Hannah!

I'd been warned about it before, but things are Hellas expensive down here. Lunch yesterday for the bro, SIL and I ran us almost $70. A Big Mac meal at McDonald's (Macca's) was $9.90, although that did include $1 extra to get bacon(!) on it; that was still about half the price the continental breakfast at our hotel would have been, though.

Christchurch is an interesting city. Despite the big earthquake being a bit over 3 years ago, there are quite a few places that are still rubble. Others look fine on the outside but still have structural issues that prevent them from being used, and the city hasn't been able to either demolish or repair them yet. They've had quite a few issues with flooding as well, so having to deal with that while recovering from the earthquake hasn't been fun.

Still standing.

Akaroa was a pretty cool area, although it would be much more fun to visit in a jeep or something; there are a lot of windy little roads, and many are only 1.5 lanes wide.  The town itself is like a slightly less impressive French version of Leavenworth, but it's got some very impressive views.

Down by the bay, where no watermelons grow.

After that it was back up to Christchurch for a rugby match. Like almost every sports team I root for, the local Crusaders lost, but we had great seats and it was fun to watch.  Very hard to follow between 15 guys running around on each team and not fully understanding the game, but still interesting.

But there was no joy in Christchurch; the Crusaders missed six
points worth of penalty kicks, and lost by five.

Tomorrow it's off to Oamaru to take in the sites--including a Steampunk museum, and I think some penguins--with a possible stop to see some wallabies along the way.