Penguins, Hockey & Butterflies

It's Sunday night here. We are resting after a weekend full of discovery in Dunedin. We set out Saturday just before lunch for the two hour trek. Dunedin is only 138km from home and the speed limit for the most part is 100 km/hr but it takes almost two hours to get there. There are a number of small towns that you must slow down to go through and then there are the curves in the road that require a lower speed. The rest of the family doesn't always seem to like the speed that I take the turns at, and this time was no exception. Sammy was feeling like puking by the time we hit Balclutha, which is about half-way. We took a break there and found a pharmacy to get some motion sickness pills. Sammy has the Horton gag-reflex and doesn't like to swallow any kind of pills so until Saturday had only ever taken liquid or chewable medicine. They don't have chewable anti-nauseous meds here so he had to learn how to swallow pills. After one false start he did it. Abby on the other hand wasn't so successful and ended up with half dissolved pills in her mouth which was enough to make her vomit. She did this on the sidewalk on a side street and then chewed more pills. We figured that made it a real trip for us.

We arrived in Dunedin and checked in at the Dunedin Holiday Park where we had booked a lodge room. It wasn't anything fancy but suited us just fine. From there we did a little shopping, we are trying to find wet suits for all of us at a reasonable price. We didn't have any luck finding any. After shopping it was off to Penguin Place to see some more penguins. We didn't do the penguin tour the last time we were in Dunedin because the cost, $85 for the family, seemed a little steep. We decided to give it a go this time though. It was well worth the expense. It was a guided tour. We hopped on a bus and after about a 10 minute ride through a sheep farm we arrived at the penguin reserve. Our tour guide then led us through a maze of trails and paths to different areas to see some penguins. We saw at least twenty penguins and we were really close to a bunch of them. There was one, Anj, that we were only 1 metre from. Part of the tour was through a series of covered trenches that have been constructed to get the visitors closer to the penguins. It was really neat. Another neat thing was the only other person our tour turned out to be from Toronto. Her name is Sarah Covshoff and she is on a globe trotting travel experience after receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell. The whole penguin reserve operation is a private enterprise started 20 years ago by a farmer. It is self-sufficient with no funding beyond the revenue it generates from giving tours, quite a feat. It was an awesome experience. We left filled with a renewed appreciation for the natural world.


The tour lasted a lot longer than we had anticipated so we decided that supper would be pizza in our room. We ended up getting Dominoes but it doesn't taste the same. All pizza here has some kind of barbecue sauce on it. Sometimes it's swirled on top and other times it takes the place of pizza sauce. Nonetheless, it was good pizza. Contrary to how Samantha has captioned the one picture, I was not drinking the giant bottle of Coke. I had three swigs and no more. In fact the bottle made the trip home and is still over half full. Before we went to bed we had to adjust our watches since daylight savings time ended in NZ this weekend. (For those of you keeping track that means we are now only 16 hours ahead.) We made the adjustment right and were at the arena, the Dunedin Ice Stadium, for an 8 a.m. game on Sunday morning. I am the coach of Sammy's team, they didn't have one before the asked me on Tuesday. I didn't share with them that I have only ever won one game as a coach! Things didn't start so well. The first game of the day we played Dunedin and got rolled. I'm not sure what the final score was because they stopped putting the other team's goals up once they were ahead 7-0. Gore ended up scoring 3 goals and Sammy got one of them. The boys weren't discouraged though and after a break were ready to go in our second game of the day. This one went a little better and they won it. I was pleased for them. There are only 5 centres on the South Island that have hockey, and only 4 of them have Peewee teams - kids 12 & under. The games are scheduled one weekend a month and they are all held at one rink. Each month the games are in a different town and each team plays two games. Next month they are here in Gore.


We were out of the arena by 12:30 p.m. and headed over to the Otago Museum. It is at the Otago University and we had heard lots of good things about it, especially the rain forest room. It was fantastic. The kids loved it, Samantha & I really enjoyed it and the rain forest room was great. It's full of butterflies, has a three storey waterfall and is kept at a balmy 28 degrees Celsius. There was also a really interesting exhibit in another part of the museum called the Da Vinci Machines. I couldn't help but leave wanting to learn more about Da Vinci.


It feels like we planned a hockey weekend in Dunedin but ended up squeezing a couple of hockey games in while we had an weekend of discovery and learning.