Blah Blah Bliss: Day 19 Saturday (20/08/2011)

Eeek! We slept in! Ian had his alarm set for 7am but we woke at 8am; a nice cosy sleep though. BUT, I still was cranky. We prayed about our day though and I determined to 'change up my attitude'. We decided to go to the Otago Peninsula out from Dunedin about 40km.

A beautiful drive right beside the water most of the way. We were hoping to see penguin and albatross at the Royal Albatross Centre. On our way we dropped in to see Larnach Castle which is New Zealand's only castle (apparently). It's situated right up on a high hill (as usual) and is hardly what I'd call a 'castle'. Not quite as grand as I'd expect a castle to be, but like a castle on a small scale. (Not that I've seen any castles in my life, but what I've seen on the telly.) It has an interesting history though. We drove right to the top and the entry and found we had to pay to see (a) castle and garden $NZ25@ or (b) just the gardens $NZ12.50@, so we decided to look at the castle from the gardens. They weren't that grand either, but it was interesting with a lot of nice little photo ops for me, and we enjoyed the relaxing walk around.

Then we drove the rest of the way to see the albatross and penguins, but of course it was $NZ25@ for a guided tour. We opted to watch the live-streaming video of the nesting albatross for a while for free and the staff told us lots of stories about these amazing gigantic birds and their history.

We then drove back into town. I forgot to say that prior to our drive we went to the farmer's markets and bought one rose apple, $NZ1, a loaf of 'pain au levain' $NZ5, 600g frozen raspberries, $NZ6, some Evansdale Farmhouse Brie, $NZ7, and a Chocolate Brioche, $NZ3.50. We also went for a short walk around town to see some of the famous architecture and churches. I've found some of the things that make these towns famous are a bit over-rated in most cases. I suppose I'm comparing everything to Paris, which is hardly fare is it? We had a lunch of brioche, bread, cheese and raspberries. A wee bit decadent you may think? Hmmm? (THEN, we went for our peninsula drive!)

On our way back we spotted a ewe and her twin lambs which I was able to photograph. Thank you Mrs. Ewe! So cute.

We headed out of Dunedin to Omaru, and arrived in the dark. I wasn't fussed about staying at the Top 10 Holiday Park, and even though Omaru looks like a fascinating place because of all of its old architecture, we decided to keep going. We were going to find a rest area, but instead we found a camper park set up on farmland run by an Aussie. It was right near the beach (although we couldn't see it in the dark) and for $NZ25/night for a powered site, we took it. We had bought BBQ'd chicken legs as we left Dundein and had munched on those as we travelled along as an early dinner, (très délicieux!), so we just had a small snack of toasted 'pain au levain' and brie for supper and I had a desert of raspberries and cream. Woopsie!