Auckland

We have been in Auckland for three days. The first day we were recovering from the 10 hour flight with a 5 hour time change. We switched from the airport hotel we had found at 2 in the morning to the youth hostel downtown. When we had settled into the hostel we walked down to the Skytower and watched crazy people do the skyjump. They jump off the tower and pass the observation deck on the way down. They have an option of braking and hamming in front of the amassed viewers. There is a little screen inside which tell you 5 minutes, 2 minutes and 30 seconds before each jumper. We whiled away a bit of time watching them go.

We got to the skytower at 4.30 but no one wanted to go and come back for sunset. Jacob and I stayed up for 4 hours (he played with his gameboy) and watched the sunset. It was actually a pleasant place to watch the city and plan our 3 days here. I read the guidebook and pamphlets and had a pretty good idea by sunset of the sights to visit yesterday and today. Apparently we missed feeling an earthquake because we were in the quake proof building. I don't think it was a big earthquake anyway....

My mission for yesterday was to get some wool to start knitting. I will be making either mittens or socks by the time I get on the MAGIC BUS tomorrow. We will be taking the bus around New Zealand for the next three weeks. It took about 2 hours to book each stage of the journey and the Youth Hostels along the way, but now we have it all organized. I had to take a ferry over to a suburb to get the wool. Heather came with me and I made a lucky escape from having to go to the maritime museum with Alan and Jacob. After 25 years with Alan, I have seen enough boat museums to last me.

Today we all went to a historical museum called Howick. It is like Upper Canada Village but it is on a much smaller scale. They have about 30 buildings but they are not all restored. The whole site only has 2 costumed interpretors at any one time. One day a month they have a lot of volunteers who come in costume for special theme days. Sadly, today was not one of those days.

It was very interesting to see the differences in approach between the two villages. I think visitors get much more out of a village with more interpretation. Apparently there are not very many open air museums in New Zealand, but there may be two more that we can see possibly. The kids liked it. It has been a while since we went to any except Upper Canada Village. They got really burned out on historical museums two summers ago in the maritimes where they are thick on the ground and we went to at least 5 that I can remember.