CHRISTCHURCH VISIT

Monday evening Sis. Gubler and I attended an ABBA tribute concert with a few other senior missionaries at the Bruce Mason convention center in Takapuna. Thursday evening we treated Kazuhiko and Tazuko Yamashita to dessert at House of Chocolate, and said our farewells.

 Friday morning we got up early and drove to the Auckland airport, to catch our 8 a.m. flight to Christchurch on the South Island. We attended the International Law and Religion seminar at The George hotel, which Alisa and the Communication dept. had helped plan. Then Alisa and I were free for the weekend. We drove 1 1/2 hours to Hamner Spings which was in the mountains, a very Swiss looking resort town. We checked into The Spa Lodge, and had just enough time to go for a swim across the street at the Hamner Springs resort. This place had around 20 pools, tubs and water slides, all using hot springs water. Then we walked to an Indian restaurant downtown for dinner, before we crashed after a long day.

 On Saturday we slept in some, listened to Pres. Russell Nelson’s address about the importance of gratitude, had an oatmeal breakfast (we brought our own oatmeal and the motel furnished the milk as always), then we went back to the resort, where we tried out the various water slides then soaked for a couple of hours. It was pleasant to ride the water slides with heated water! For lunch, I had a pizza and Alisa a salad at the little cafe on site. Then we hiked in some pretty woods nearby before driving back to Christchurch. There we checked into our bnb (Orari), a restored home from the 1890’s, located in the touristy downtown area. It was about 6:30 p.m. by then, so we walked around downtown but most places were closed.  We visited the Anglican Cathedral which is still undergoing repairs from the 2011 earthquake damage.  We found a nice food court that was open, and had Cambodian food for dinner.

 This morning we attended the Parklands ward for Sacrament meeting. We actually knew a couple of YSA’s that were attending there, and saw the NZ member who is the Olympic champion in women’s shot put the last few Olympics, who was also visiting. Then we visited the Catholic Basilica that was wrecked in the 2011 earthquake and which has yet to be rebuilt, “punted” down the River Avon through their botanical gardens, visited the Canterbury museum near Christ’s College, and rode the tram (electric trolley car) around town. All the wreckage from the 2011 earthquake has long ago been cleaned up, but many of the buildings have just disappeared or are holes in the ground or not yet restored, due to lack of money.  For instance, the Catholic Basilica has yet to be restored because of no finances; supposedly Rome has been approached about financing the repairs.  The multi story Holiday Inn is just a huge hole in the ground.  By now we had seen what we wanted to see, so we rescheduled our 7 p.m. flight to 4 p.m., and flew home early, in order to get a good start on our final work week coming right up!