Wellington Day 2 10/9/13
We woke up to a much more blustery day than before really high winds and a somewhat grey day. We had a coffee a cereal bar and then made some plans for the day. It looked like tomorrow was going to be rainy so we decide to do some outdoor things today and hit the museums tomorrow.
Heading out we found it was equally blowy at street level we headed to a local pub to grab some lunch. Byrnie had a steak sandwich, I had a BLAT which was bacon lettice tomato and avocado it was really tasty. We washed it down with two pints of Speight's gold medal ale which was pretty good. Refreshed we headed out to the Cable car.
The Cable car was originally a steam powered wooden version that was put in to allow access to the estate on the hill for more housing in the busy wellington area. They used the cable car because of the steep terrain. The system stayed in for many years switching from steam to electric in the 1930’s but was eventually retired in the 1970’s due to safety issue and a more modern Swiss designed system put in.
The old winding house which was left to decay after the new cable car was put in the 1970’s it was eventually restored and turned into a cable car museum which was fairly small but not bad for free museum. There were some interesting displays some of the original cars and the winding room. It also had a video on private cable cars. Wellington apparently has lots of private cable cars due to the steep slopes house can be built on the land above the city that can only be practically reached by cable cars. It’s a local cottage industry to design and build the things.
We headed over to the Carter observatory which had a nice little museum on space and astronomy as well as some stuff on Cook’s observation of the transit of venus which earned him an extra 100 pounds on top of his captains pay. After the exhibit we watched a film on the way space abuses astronauts bodies and then a display on the night sky for the area which was pretty interesting. Byrnie got a special seat one covered in a new trail material and he had to give a report to the lady running things about the quality of his seated experience. She also forgot to turn the projector on the first run.
After the observatory we had a wander around the botanical gardens we took some pictures and found it was pretty difficult to take pictures of flowers in high wind. Somewhat windblown and tired we headed back into town via the cable car and had a coffee to warm up and recover. We then grabbed some sandwiches and misc food stuffs for tea and headed back home.
There was a truly awful Steven Segal film called True Justice which barely had Segal in it and was still terrible. Outside the weather was lashing the windows with rain and gale force winds which made us glad not to be out. Indeed there was some piece on the news that said the high winds were unusually strong across New Zealand reaching 240km/h in some places tearing down power lines and trees in wellington it was upto 130km/h. Hopefully that will die down before we have to get the ferry to the south island.
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