Give them roots and wings

Day 11

We started our drive back to Christchurch at 8:30am, stopped for petrol at 9:30am, and packed a BK lunch at 11:30am.

After travelling more than 300 km, we reached Christchurch at 1:15pm.

We checked-in to Amross Court Motor Lodge, returned the Campervan (boo hoo!) and picked up the car (We waited for quite some time for the car. There were some hiccups. But all for the better).

But the moral of the story was – always give yourself sufficient time for these unforseen circumstances.

As a result of this, we had to make a mad rush to the Riccarton Mall.  We had a movie to catch at 4:45pm! It was “The Hobbit”!

The kids had their tea.
I had some Japanese curry rice.
I missed Asian food…

It gave me quite a thrill to watch “The Hobbit” in New Zealand. We were Lord of the Ring (LOTR) fans. In fact we got the children to watch the series in preparation for this trip!

I felt it was such a privilege to be in such a beautiful country, which produced such a talented film-maker who produced such awesome film adaptations of JR Tolkien’s masterpieces.

It meant a lot to me, to be able to end our Campervan travel around South Island with “The Hobbit”.

Dinner was MacDonalds (again). But it was more because there was an indoor playground there, and the children wanted to play in it.

After dinner, we went Grocery shopping.

Yes, we bought potato chips…
We loved the chicken flavour!

Day 12

The next day, we visited the Airforce Museum. Entry was free but we paid $25 for the family to do the Airforce Adventure Tour. Edmund was not impressed, but the children had fun.

We were gathered together by the “training instructor”,
and brought to the “training area”.
The first thing we did was the “drill”.

We”boarded” an Andover aircraft,
and had to do an emergency jump!

We did a “multi-sensory test”.

We created a paper model of an aircraft
and tested its aerodynamics.

Finally we tracked down the answers to the
Awesome Aircraft Hunt.
The challenge had three difficulty levels.
For the “Easy” level, (Samuel), he only had to locate the aircraft
based on the photos given.
For the “Medium” and “Advanced” level, (Elkan and Elias),
they had to locate the aircraft
based on the clues given.

These were the OTHER things we saw at the museum:-

Look, the Singapore things!

Guess what we found!
Tengah Airbase (Singapore!)
and KLIM milk!

We had lunch at the Farmer’s Market at Riccarton at about 1pm. It was cool! (But actually the weather was hot!). Elias also bought a toy plane. I had another “real-fruit” boysenberry ice-cream. Yum yum!!

2:45pm

We decided to visit the Cantebury Museum, and had a wonderful 1.5 hours there. We particularly liked the re-creation of this Paua Shell house, which belonged to Fred and Myrtle.

I really enjoyed the “Real stories” – re-creation of oldtime Canterbury.

The streets were cool!
The horse was gigantic – Samuel has to be carried up.
The mannequin actually “spoke” to me, hee hee…

We also saw an exhibition about the Christchurch earthquake.

I liked the write-up on this.
I have never heard of liquefaction before this.
I liked how it was described – that it was what broke them,
and hell smells like that.
I agree, that often, it is the smell that kills us.
It also gave me a good idea,
about how hell is much worse than what we can imagine it to be.

We went to Majestic Church for the 5pm evening service. By that time, Samuel had fallen asleep.

After the service, we went grocery shopping. We also visited our friends (they had 4 kids, and the friends they were travelling with had 4 kids too!) who had just arrived at Christchurch.  The children had fun kicking a ball with their new friends.

Then we went back to our motel and cooked “chicken rice” for dinner. After 13 days of burgers and fish and chips, we were craving for the chinaman’s staple – rice!

Dinner was delicious.

Day 13

We drove to Akaroa. It was a 1.5 hour’s drive. The scenery just 5 minutes outside of Christchurch was beautiful!

We had lunch at L’escargo.

Lunch
and yummy ice-cream!
For me, I had the Kapiti Boysenberry again.

Then we took the Dolphine Cruise with the Blackcat Cruise at 1:30pm. Highly recommended. We paid $71 for an adult, and $25 for a child (Samuel got to travel for free).

We all loved the wind, on top of looking at the wide expanse and trying to spot the dolphins. We managed to see some.

We finished at 3+pm and rushed over to the Giant’s House at 3:30pm. It was a whimsical place, very interesting. Samuel was quite tired, and was not keen on going. But I told him we were going to the Giant’s House so he became interested. Later, he kept asking me – where is the Giant… (Sorry, Samuel!)

We visited the Lighthouse at 4pm and took a walk along the harbour front.

We left Akaroa at about 5:30pm, and had “Chicken rice” for dinner again.

Day 14

This was the day we were due to fly back to Singapore. We woke at 7:30am, drove off at 845am, were at the Airport at 10:30am, and were onboard the plane at 11:30am.

We had fun on the way back too – trying to go through as many movies as possible.

What a trip! Thank you God for everything.

There is so much more I want to say, about what this trip meant to us as a family, but that will have to be another blog post 🙂

Go back to Day 9-10 : Otago Peninsula, Lake Tekapo and Mt Cook

Return to New Zealand, South Island : Overview