Saturday 23rd February 2019 - to Christchurch and Australia

This is our last day here in New Zealand. We have talked about how we feel about moving on and there are mixed feelings. This is such a friendly place. The staff in cafes and restaurants are almost without exception (just one in Nelson!) polite, friendly, engaging, and that includes the numerous staff from all corners of the globe. When you are out and about people say hello! Even if that is just as you are walking down the street! We have been so blessed with the weather and we know we have been lucky on that count. The roads are generally quiet. There is a feeling of space, the housing is individual and spacious, they have coast, countryside and mountains, but also volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. I don’t think we really want to emigrate but I can understand why there are so many young people from all over the world here and seeing what happens.

I am writing this as we wait for our flight to Sydney from Christchurch airport. We had a leisurely journey down, stopping for coffee and lunch, predictably so! We also detoured to a couple of beaches as we were driving down the coast. This was our last…….

Now the next bit of our adventure. We have arrived in Sydney having had the nicest of flights with Emirates on an airbus 380. A huge plane and we hardly knew we had taken off!

It’s raining here, and it’s dark, and 2 hours time difference makes us need to have some sleep. Lots of exploring to do tomorrow!