Sunday – Last Day in Wellington

We experienced our first full rainy day, the only thing I can compare it to is the fall weather in Seattle. It became wet and dreary all day long but we still managed to get in some good sites. Every day up to today had clear blue skies and fair weather. We started our day visiting Old St. Paul’s Church, the US Marine Corps and US Ambassador had been here the week before to commemerate some sort of event so we saw the American Flag and Marine Corps flag hanging inside the church. I took some marvelous shots (I will post in a day or two) of the stain glass windows and beautiful church. 5397
It was then on to Te Papa Museum. Bart and I rode the “Time Warp” inside and he had a blast. We spend about 3 hours here learning about Maori, Kiwi, Malasyian and Polynesian culture amongst other things. We had lunch at a so-so seafood place called Fisherman’s Table. After lunch, we headed over to the Parliment Building -the country’s capital building. We got a tour of the House of Representatives and were given a New Zealand civic’s overview by the tour guide. Of course, I had the inclination to start a discussion regarding the Labour parties views vs. the National Parties views and how improvement could be made by following a few simple suggestions but that’s goes off into a political tangent…..

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We finished the evening early today and with good reason, we have to pack for our flight from Wellington to Christchurch. We leave early tomorrow morning and have found out something dreadful! Air New Zealand has draconian weight rules regarding luggage. Each person is allocated 20 kg (44 lbs) and we’ve been purchasing many items over the past few days and now we’re worried we’ll be heavily penalized if we are way over. The cost is $5/kg over the limit; we’re trying to get rid of any excess items we can do without for the remainder of the trip. The problem will increase as we acquire more stuff and have to fly from Christchurch to Queenstown then from Queenstown back to Auckland then finally back to the US. We’ll try to check in later but it may be a day or two before we post and blogs or photos.