Timaru Trip — Part 1

We went to Timaru over Easter weekend. Dad had Friday and Monday off, so it was a perfect time to go somewhere! The only problem was that Thursday Cyclone Ita decided to hit our island! We had torrential rain all day, and we got a good 4-6 inches in total. The creek level rose until it flowed over the banks, and around early Thursday afternoon our paddock looked like this:

The creek is to the very left in the picture, under that willow tree—you can just see it. This picture was taken from in the house—it was too wet to take the camera outside!

We had originally been planning to go to Nelson that weekend, but Friday morning we heard that both routes were closed because of slips (landslides), and it was impassable. So for an hour or two, we didn’t know what we’d do—whether we’d stay at home, or go south to this conference we’d heard about after making our plans for going to Nelson!

A river in flood—every river except one we crossed Friday was in a stage of high flood!

I hate being in limbo like that. I much prefer having all plans settled several days ahead of time, but this time it wasn’t like that—and I had NO idea what we’d do! We were all pretty sad that we couldn’t go to Nelson, so an hour or two that morning was a bit gloomy. Then, around 10 am Dad decided we’d go to Timaru! So we scurried around (I hadn’t even packed my bags, so I had that to do yet!), and pulled out of here around 12 pm.

The trip south was uneventful, and we arrived there just after the 4 pm meeting started. Then we had tea (dinner/supper) there at the church. Dad asked about a place where we could put a pop-top caravan and a couple tents up, and two different families wanted us to come to their place. There was a bit of an argument before Dad decided on the less-peopled place, where an older couple lived.

Another river in high flood.

When we got there, one of the men who was staying there offered to move in the house and let us have the caravan he had to sleep in. After some deliberation, we finally decided to take him up on his offer so that weekend instead of sleeping in tents on a soggy ground we slept in state in his comfortable caravan! That was really nice—I hadn’t been looking forward to sleeping outside since I am a terrible camper, but God worked it all out in the end.

Friday evening, I remembered that a friend of a friend, Rhoda, who I had met once at another conference last June lived around Timaru or Oamaru, I wasn’t quite sure where. I asked Mom, and she thought Oamaru, perhaps. I thought it would be really neat if we could meet up somehow. I had had a little contact online with her since we first met up, but nothing very serious (in my opinion, anyway!).

In the end, I was able to find who I thought it was in the phone book and contact them (that’s a bit of a story in itself!) and arranged to meet them on Saturday. So Saturday morning, we went down to Oamaru!

There was still water across the road at one point as we were going to Oamaru.

We had a bit of an adventure finding them, what with sight-seeing a little as we tried to spot their street. Thankfully, it wasn’t too hard to find their place in the end, so we got there in good time for lunch.

This old church is near where they live—although we didn’t find that out until later.

After lunch, they offered to take us on a bit of a tour of Oamaru, something that we gladly accepted.

The church spires were fascinating (at least to me! ;) )!

 

So we walked down into the older section of town, and I loved seeing all the old buildings around there. :)

There was a Buick parked beside the church we had seen earlier—the boys were interested in that!

 

Don’t know what kind of a building this was, but the beautiful swirls and things on it was really neat to see!

Mom said that this time I should be a tourist. So I was a tourist. Even though I didn’t want to be. ;)

 

The boys went over to look at the Steampunk locomotive.

 

It was fascinating to see all the different buildings!

 

 

I can’t remember what this street was called, but it goes through the main part of the older buildings. We learned later that this street is used during the annual Victorian Festival for an interesting purpose. People compete in a contest of trying to ride a penny-farthing up as far as they can without falling off! Sounds like a very ambitious goal to me!

Coming from quite a ways north, it was a little surprising (for me, at least) to see roads like this—going straight up and over a hill! Timaru has the same kinds of roads. Where we come from, you go around the hills—not over top of them!

We got a bit of a closer look at the Steampunk engine—and I decided that Steampunk isn’t my thing.

And that’s all, for now. I have all the pictures for the next (and last) post ready, I just need to put in captions now. Hopefully I’ll have time soon! Our weekend is looking busy right now, but if I get up early-ish tomorrow morning I’ll be able to work on it then, perhaps.

And an editing update: I finished Camp NaNoWriMo, but apparently even though it looked like my wordcount was validated when I put it in somehow it wasn’t, so it doesn’t actually look like I won. But I did anyway, with 10,000 words (or maybe it was 13,000—I can’t remember). I didn’t hit the goal of getting 100% of the novel done in April, but as things turned out I didn’t have enough time in the end, so I’m thankful to have gotten that much done.

Now I am going to try a different technique, which I read about in a book, which will hopefully help me to get the editing done a little bit faster than what I was doing before. Hopefully, I’ll be able to tell you about it soon if it works! Right now, I’m just about up to my ears in school, work, and other odd jobs, but I really do want to make time to edit sometime, too.

Anyway, enough jabbering. I should let this get published—after waiting two and a half weeks since the trip I think it’s about time for these pictures to go up!