January 10 - Back to Christchurch

Braindeath spreads...a girl sits in the middle of the airport concourse, plugged into a floor outlet so she can use her iPad and iPhone at the same time. God help us.

Like a leisurely stroll, we left Fairlie and wandered the back roads out to highway 1 at Temuka. Then it was the strait shot up 1 to Christchurch. We arrived, much as we had left, in the rain, and here we are again, the last night in New Zealand.

We decided that we would go out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant downtown. I went on line and searched. I found one that had nothing but 5 star ratings. I called to make sure it was open, or to see if we needed a booking. A Japanese man with poor english answered the phone. "Are you open for business?" I asked. "What" he replied. It went like this for a couple of iterations until he understood what I was asking. Finally he said "No open. Restaurant destroyed".

We selected another place and carefully laid out our route, but ran into the dead end not shown on the map. The city was in shambles right where we wanted to go. There are lots of one-way routings through the earthquake zone, but none to where we wanted to go. It appears that the building we were headed for simply no longer exists. By sheer coincidence we ended up in the area we had been on our first trip in 2006, to find that a Greek restaurant we had eaten in had been destroyed. It's pretty shocking to see the devastation of a place we had spent time in. This isn't supposed to happen in the real world. It's supposed to happen "over there"; you know, Chile or something. A few pictures just taken driving trying to find a way through. Not even close to the "bad stuff".

We ate here

I didn't even know Christchurch had a beach...

This is cool. The cart automatically puts on the brakes at the edge of the car park. It must be magnetic like one of those invisible fences for dogs. Now if they could just issue bark collars for the kids in the carts...

It's going to take some time for me to decide what I think of this trip, or if I'll return. I know that it has been too long and poorly organized. The only profound thing that I can say right now is I miss my cat.