So the good news is that the 90km an hour winds that we had yesterday afternoon / evening / overnight have died down but unfortunately they have been replaced with rain which is a shame but I guess it is spring so we shouldn’t be surprised. For our last day on the north island we decided to go up the cable car to see if we can get any views across the city, but first we went to Antrim house, this was once the home of Robert Hannah, an Englishman that came to New Zealand via Australia, he manufactured shoes and later opened a chain of stores which are still running today although they are no longer run by the family. The house is now the National office of heritage New Zealand but the good news is that despite being offices the receptionist took time out from her work to show us some of the main rooms. The main areas that remain as they did when it was a home are the entrance hall and front doors, although most rooms have period fireplaces and the kitchen still has the original cupboards but the ranges have been removed. Robert was married to Hannah Ferguson (same family as Sarah Ferguson) who rather unfortunately became Hannah Hannah! We left there and set off for the cable car, although it’s still raining we decided we would go up and have a look round the Cable Car museum if nothing else, which in the end was exactly what we did as it was raining really hard by the time we finished in the museum we didn’t bother with the walk around the residential area at the top. The cable car actually allowed the building of the residential area at the top of the hill as it made it significantly easier to get up and down. Despite the rain we decided to continue exploring the downtown area and walked round to the parliament buildings. This building is very odd, the old building is really nice and Georgian in design, the new building looks like a beehive that has been added on the side – very odd. Further down this complex was church looking building that was actually the parliamentary library! Just to continue the theme the new cathedral is next door which is a very ugly, plain 1970s style building which replaces the Old St Paul’s which is a beautiful timber Church, we haven’t seen one like that since we were in Russia. It was lovely inside, despite being replaced by the new St Paul’s it is still consecrate so I assume it could be used for marriages or baptisms which would be a lovely setting. Having explored the whole of the church we decided to head off for lunch. Unfortunately Wellington doesn’t seem to do lunch in Mondays! A number of restaurants we found only open Tuesday to Sunday we finally found a Chinese restaurant where we were the only non-Chinese customers, they were just closing so we could only choose off the light menu, but all the same the food was good and it was nice to be out of the rain! Finally we set off for the museum again to visit the Maori exhibits which were really interesting and again a good way to dry out, once we had finished looking round we went back to the apartment to sort everything out so that we are ready to get the ferry in the morning.
