Stewart Island, Oban, and Rakiura National Park...

 January 5, 2025

The good weather continued to stay with us for our stay in Oban on Stewart Island, south of the South Island of New Zealand. Tomorrow will be seven days until we leave the Seabourn Quest. She says, quietly letting tears flow. It's been a long journey, perhaps too long at our age, but we've made a couple of new friends and seen parts of the world we've never seen before and a few we have seen before.

Seabourn Quest, our "Home Away from Home" as the Captain calls it.

This is one of the "tenders" that takes us back and forth to our destination when there is no docking facility.

From the tender, this is what we see approaching the ship after a day ashore. That tiny little square down by the waterline is our miniscule landing spot.

Our miniature landing spot, AKA, "dock," up closer.

Part of the tiny (about 700 full time residents) town of Oban on Stewart Island.

Randy keeps damaging himself. Luckily for him, he has a live-in nurse.

Although Oban and Stewart Island do not get much rainfall (a lot less than Tucson), the forest surrounding it (Rakiura National Park, which encompasses more than 90% of the island), the forest is quite thick!

Our chariot for our tour.

Our guide and chariot driver.

Interesting way of honoring people, these are embedded in the ground.

Use your imagination on this, it is a GIANT link in a GIANT chain.

Another embedded saying.

A memorial to the first telephone line laid underwater to Stewart Island.

Kiwis come out in the evening so we have not seen one in the wild yet.

And so we leave Oban and head to "scenic cruising" tomorrow in Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound, a couple of places that we have been before, on a driving (in a campervan, known as an RV is the States) trip many years ago. The Captain tells us we will continue to have good weather tomorrow.

Timaru and some sunshine...

 Sunshine in Timaru! We took the shuttle provided by the town into the town and were rewarded with a nice pub lunch and a farmers' market/craft fair. I bought two pairs of Christmas earrings. Wait until next year!

Speights Ale is the local brewery and we each had a nice ale (is there any other kind?) at Speights Ale House. I had an APA Pale Ale and Randy had an Old Dark Ale.

The original sign with a slight change of ownership!

Randy's Old Dark Ale

All the beers on tap. And one of the barmaids, all the servers were women.

Speights is housed in the oldest building Timaru.

Don't know the name of the flowering tree (we were told its Maori name and I promptly forgot it). We were told it rarely blooms!

Where I bought my Christmas earrings.

Some of the other craftspeople.

A nice short afternoon in a lovely little town. On to Oban on Steward Island, the furthest south we will have ever been. Previously we had been to Bluff, the southernmost town on the South Island. Oban is further south but only accessible by air or ferry. Or Cruise Ship.

Rain, Rain, Go Away, Come Again Another Day...

January 4, 2025

It's not been all THAT rainy, but it just seems that way because of the weather overnight. We have visited Wellington before and quite a few other places in New Zealand but some of the stops are new to us (Matiatia, Timaru, and Oban or Stewart Island). 

Wellington is the capitol of New Zealand and a beautiful little city if you have a car, but for us, with no tour scheduled, it was just a quiet getaway-from-the-cruise-ship-for-a-few-hours excursion. January 2 is apparently a national holiday and there was almost nothing open, just a couple of tourist souvenir shops. And a nice pub/restaurant.

As you can see, a stunningly beautiful day! The round building is a government building called the Beehive and is the Executive Wing of their Parliament Building.

Downtown Wellington was deserted on what normally would be a busy downtown street.

We managed to find a pub that was open (many restaurants we passed were closed, some until January 13) and we tried some New Zealand beers. Mine was semi-American because they used American hops rather than NZ hops.

Downtown was deserted but we were passed by about 40 busses in the time we were eating (and drinking!) our lunch.

From Wellington we went on to Christchurch and the rainiest day yet. And some of the worst seas yet on the way to Christchurch, our tour of the Air Force Museum of New Zealand (About the Air Force Museum of New Zealand) and the International Antarctic Center (www.iceberg.co.nz), and pouring down rain. Again.

Some passengers braving the wind and rain to go on tour. It was worse later when we went!

Pictures are worth a thousand dollars!

Our guide to the Air Force Museum, Steve. Excellent guide!

Bleriot XI-2 “Brittania”

It was a larger and more powerful version of the Bleriot XI, the aircraft in which inventor-turned-aviator Louis Bleriot had famously become the first person to fly across the English Channel, in July 1909.

The XI-2 was presented to the New Zealand Government in 1913 by a group of English businessmen known as the Imperial Air Fleet Committee. After an embarrassing start – it arrived in New Zealand without its propeller – Britannia’s first demonstration flights took place above the Auckland Showgrounds in January 1914. It was flown by official Government Pilot, Joe Hammond, one of the few New Zealanders who held a pilot’s licence at the time.

When the time came to choose a passenger, Hammond picked pantomime actor Esme McLellan rather than one of the many dignitaries present.

They have a repair/refurbish shop much like the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson. Our guide had heard of it and hoped to visit one day.

When this recreation is done, it will be the only one in the world.

All in all, an interesting excursion. But that museum needs more seating areas! Luckily, I had my seat cane with me so I could sit down whenever I wanted to.

On to the Antarctic Experience.

Still pouring down rain. Or, as our old weather station said, "Raining cats and dogs!"

Looking for our guy in pink (one of the cruise passengers on our tour) was the only way to keep track of our group since our guide wasn't telling where we were going next!

Inside the "cold room" a storm was raging. It was really, REALLY cold in there and they had a high speed fan blowing that really, REALLY cold air around. They did give us coats to wear, but no easy way to get out before the 10 minute demonstration of just exactly how cold it was in Antarctica was done.

They did have a nice little cafeteria.

And still raining when we got back to the ship.

On to Timaru tomorrow (January 4).

Sad goodbyes in Auckland...

 December 30, 2024

Auckland, New Zealand

We are losing a lot of friends today as 230 passengers are getting off and 230 are getting on in Auckland. Long Beach to Auckland was a 32-day portion of the 46-day Long Beach to Sydney cruise. Especially good news for us, to offset the pain of leaving several friends behind, is that we now have accumulated enough points to be eligible for---drum roll, please!---free bags of laundry, one for each of us every seven days! No more queuing for the four (only) washers and dryers! It takes so little to make us happy!

Auckland is HOHO territory. Not laughter but the Hop On Hop Off busses that work in most cities around the world (not Wellington, however, but the weather in Wellington is supposed to be terrible so we probably wouldn't do it anyway).

There are two routes, the Red Route and the Blue Route. One ticket entitles you to both routes but you must change busses to go from one to the other. We lucked out with the first Red bus we got because it changed to the Blue route at the changeover location (where we would normally have gotten off the Red but and waited for a Blue bus) so we stayed on. When the Blue bus got back to the changeover, it changed to the Red bus so we never had to move and got the whole two tours.

While we were in AKL, Royal Princess was also in port. We are 450 passengers, Royal Princess is 4275 passengers! Not a good photo but interesting to see the size difference!

Some of our good friends who left the Quest in AKL.

The day before AKL, there was a goodbye and thank you party to thank all the staff who work so hard on board to keep us fed, watered, and clean!

We have been to AKL a few times before so we just wanted to ride and around and sightsee.