If it's Thursday it must be Christchurch

We arrived in Lyttelton harbour this morning, very overcast and quite cool about 7 am. We headed off our tour to Christchurch about 8.45 . It was a most enjoyable tour. Out first stop was the historic Ilam homestead a lovely old home established in 1850 however destroyed by fire in 1911 and rebuilt by Edgar Stead. The homestead now belongs to the University with the homestead being used by the academic staff and the beautiful gardens can be enjoyed by all. The uni residences are close by. We wandered round the gardens after our huge morning tea!! Like we needed more food. After that stop we headed off to the Botanic Gardens and Arts Precinct. Didn’t quite get to the gardens as we did the galleries and craft shops first. Beautiful art and crafts, coffee shops, etc. Following that we traveled up the hills to admire the stunning views of the harbor, the Banks Peninsula the Canterbury Plain and the Southern Alps. Christchurch is a lovely city, we did see some of the rebuilding taking place in the city where the earthquake hit
New Zealand (the little I have seen) is all hills! It’s quite lovely. Tomorrow takes us to Dunedin NZ’s most Scottish City our last stop. Looking forward to that as we are going to visit the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. No camera’s allowed inside, but samples of chocolates are plentiful!!!
For anyone who has received 6+ texts from me - all identical - I apologise. The messages showed as having failed to send and continued to try sending which resulted in 7 messages being sent to someone !!
The wireless signal hasn’t been too strong and I haven’t managed to include photographs.
Til next time…..
PS Forgot to say. If you saw the NZ film Heavenly Creatures (which was a true story) some years ago, one of the girls lived in Ilam Homestead. Must have ben the one from the wealthy family… The homestead has been used for many movies,,,,