Christchurch

We awoke earlier than expected this morning.  This is the day we leave for Christchurch.  We got ready and headed down to the breakfast buffet.  The hotel is obviously thinning out as guests head out of town to avoid the cyclone.  We did share the breakfast buffet with the rugby team, the Gallagher Chiefs.  We will be seeing the New South Wales Waratahs play the Christchurch Crusaders later this month, if I didn’t buy the tickets from a scam website.  

We left early to head to the Rotorua airport.  We needed to return our rental car, check our bags and get through AvSec (New Zealand’s version of TSA).  Gayle and I emptied our bottles of water in the parking lot so that we could fill them again once we were through AvSec.  Checking our bags was a breeze.  There was no AvSec at this regional airport and no one cared about our water bottles.  We did not put any gas in the rental car because it is a hybrid and the gas gauge never moved off of Full.  The woman told us we should have gotten gas and we would get a bill for the gas they needed to add to the tank.  The added cost was $1.49.

We filled our water bottles and once it was time to board the plane, we were ushered onto the tarmac to climb onto our prop plane via a ramp.  It was all so chill and old school.

The flight down to Christchurch was lovely.  We tracked where we were by following the topography on Google Maps.  The sky was blue, the ocean was turquoise and the land was green.  It is hard to believe that dangerous wind and rain are headed towards New Zealand.  We arrived without any trouble and met Lucky, the woman our travel agent arranged to pick us up.

We are staying at the Muse hotel in downtown Christchurch.  We read the reviews for this hotel and laughed out loud.  People either love this hotel or it is the worst experience of their lives.  We are glad to have found a hotel in the city center area (called CBD here) at such short notice.  The Muse hotel is considered an “art hotel”.  There are large works of weird art everywhere.  The lobby is very small and to check in Gayle had to enter this red telephone booth….

…and talk to a screen with a man from India who took her credit card information and generated our room keys.  I’ll let you know if her credit card gets hacked.

My room key did not work so I had to go back to the front desk where the clerk went into the booth and requested that the man from India generate new ones.  So strange.  Our room reminds us of tiny places we have stayed in Europe and NYC.  Only one person can be moving at the room at a time.  We took time to rest before heading out in search of food.

We are a half mile from Riverside Market, which has a plethora of food stalls.  We took an Assist Uber, which means the driver should be knowledgeable and helpful for people with mobility concerns.  He made sure to drop us off as close to the market as possible.  I tipped him well!  We ordered our food and then Gayle went in search of a cocktail.  While I was waiting for our food a woman sat down in the stool beside me and said, “I am so drunk.”  She proceeded to tell me she had gone to a Spice Girls brunch and had been drinking for 4 hours.  We had a delightful conversation because all her filters were gone. When Gayle returned with her cocktail she had stories to tell about all the “friends” she made in pursuit of a drink.  I think it would be impossible for me to exaggerate how incredibly friendly and kind the people of New Zealand have been to us.  We found a comfortable place on the second floor to enjoy our food and people watch.

We walked back to our hotel.  It is very windy here but all weather predictions show the cyclone/tropical storm will miss us here.  We heard that they have just upped the threat level to Rotorua.  We are glad to be here.