In March of 2005, we spent a little over three weeks in Sydney, Australia and New Zealand. My cousin had offered us vouchers for greatly reduced flights to Down Under. I wasn't sure I wanted to go because it seemed like such a long flight and I was expecting New Zealand to be like Hawaii and Sydney to be like Chicagoland where we were from. However, Art said, "Sure! We'd love to go."Thus on our next trip to visit my mother, we divided our vacation between Hawaii and AUS/NZ. It turned out to be one of our most favorite trips. Not only were the people so very friendly and kind, but the scenery was spectacular, awesome, amazing, fantastic. Someone told me once that driving around NZ would take extra long because you'll forever be wanting to stop the car to take photos. So true!
Art did a little research and learned quickly why Australia is considered a continent. He decided that it would cost too much to fly to different tourist spots in Australia. Instead, he said we'd spend two weeks driving through the North and South Islands of New Zealand and one week in Sydney.
Hotels are very expensive Down Under so we decided to stay in Youth Hostels. We spent two days in Christchurch, New Zealand and stayed at the Rolleston House YHA. We loved it there. We found that we had planned too short a stay in Christchurch because there were so many wonderful things to experience there and we hadn't been able to spend as much time as we wanted at their botanical garden.
That's the Canterbury Museum that we visited and could see across the street from our hostel window. We took the convenient free yellow shuttle to many of the sights in Christchurch (including the Canterbury Brewery).
The devastation we've been seeing on TV after the recent Christchurch earthquake breaks our hearts. We met so many lovely, friendly people in New Zealand and hope they're all OK. This photo was taken at Cathedral Square.
It startled me to see this photo shown on TV and on the web. I'm wondering how all the other places we'd seen fared. It's such a shock!Oahu just had a 3.6 earthquake on February 24th. That really startled us. The Big Island gets these small quakes every so often because of the live volcanoes, but not us. What is going on with our world?
