phiew

I originally though we were leaving on Monday evening at half-past nine. So did Nicky. Something made her check the flight printout this morning which was fortunate as otherwise we'd have missed the flight at half-past nine on Sunday evening. Managed to get it adjusted to half-past eleven on Monday evening with a refuelling-stop in HK instead of LA (unfortunately several years too late to get to scrape skyscrapers on the way in and out) and an amusing seven-hour gap at Heathrow as the earlier connection was flup and was probably too early to make without another stupid inter-terminal sprint. As much as the relief of not missing the flight or having to attempt to get some money back off the hotel for Sunday night we now have as much time as we thought we did to fit in things such as a poke at Rangitoto, a trip up the tower and a dangle from the bridge. The downside is that our luggage allowance is down to 20kg from the original going-via-the-states-23kg so there'll be less spare weight for squeezing in souvenir shite and gifts of sweets for workplaces.

After a post-flight-alteration celebratory trundle eastwards and a very late breakfast at Citron Vert in Parnell (ymmmmymymymymmslurp) and subsequent wanderings through the same and past some shops we hit the War Memorial museum. Despite yet another reference to the Glorious Dead at the front of it it's quite worthwhile... lots of shrooms round the trees in the surrounding park, permission to photograph the exhibits although after twenty minutes a security noticed my bag and told me to cloakroom it (hopefully the old woman on the desk wasn't offended by the removal of everything of value from the bag before handing it over but I don't trust cloakrooms with lenses, especially when the bags are just in doorless and unlocked pigeon holes), a sadly dead and stuffed heffalump and two more stuffed kakapo, my favourite flightless parrot ever since DNA informed the world of their plight in Last Chance to See. Seeing them stuffed in museums is quite disheartening, especially when there are two in the same museum; it must take quite a lot of dead kakapo to keep museumses in specimens. If they prevail (and are then left alone on their own little island for sufficiently long) then there's every chance that one day there might be a giant green flightless parrot the size of the giant moa crashing through the bush and telling any imported predators to fuck off. And beaking them up good if they don't.

There were some winter garden type sorts of thing right next to the museum so we had a poke at them until they shut. There were some signs saying not to take any pictures without prior arrangement but I hadn't known we'd be going there in order to make such an arrangement so I took some pictures anyway.

Although I live two minutes away from a nice city-centre volcanic plug it's always nice to look at other ones, especially those with nice proper crater-shaped craters in the middle of them even if the cop-out road leads right to the top (at least the road is a good 120m below the summit of Arthur's Seat) meaning that the top must be swarming with tourists all year round. Still, the odd extra peoples mean there's something besides trees to stick on the foreground.