The 60’s revisited

Starting with this post I have reduced the quality of the pictures to make the uploads smaller. The higher quality ones were taking forever to upload and sucking up all the bandwidth. Let me know if they are OK, in fact let me know if you are reading this!!!

Again we woke up to a clear morning with very few clouds. After breakfast we started out from Nelson which is on the Central North coast in a SW direction to Westport on the West coast. This trip was a lot straighter than yesterdays, but we still had a few hills to climb. The hills changed slightly, up until now the hills / mountains had been almost entirely tree covered, now many were devoid of trees and there was just rock at the top.

As in previous days, there were many lookouts along the route. Some of these had 10-15 minute walks from a parking lot to the lookout, so we still got our daily exercise (and then some!).

Next stop was a swing (suspension) bridge across the Buller Gorge. This bridge makes the Capalino (spelling) Bridge near Vancouver look pretty tame. I think a picture is worth a thousand words here.

On the Swing Bridge

Swing Bridge

The bridge is about 75ft above the river, in the office there were pictures of the same bridge during the great flood of 2010, when there was only about 10ft between the bridge and the water. There was also a walking loop around the area, which was an old gold mining area. About 130 years ago there was a lot of gold mining in the area and in fact it was one of the key reasons behind the population of NZ by Europeans.

Following on from our death defying traverse of the bridge (twice, as we had to get back!) we continued on to Westport, our destination for the night. Like other towns, this one had a High Street, which housed most of the towns stores, again pretty much all family owned businesses. The street looked very much like I remember High Streets in the ‘60s.

When we got to the hotel, we really thought we had been transported back 50 years, the furniture and the room with its brass fittings and a FUSE panel with ceramic fuses all added to the illusion. Once we had settled in and transported ourselves back to the present we headed out in search of a local seal colony. When we got there we were disappointed as we could only see one seal. After watching for a few minutes we discovered more and more seals hidden among the rocks.

Babys at Play

Mean Old Parent