Wellington...One Last Time

One of the places we have most enjoyed visiting is Wellington, named by Lonely Planet in 2011 as "the cutest little capital in the world."  It's a great little city, walkable, beautiful, windy, and full of cool stuff to do.  On both o our previous trips - with Elena in November and on our roadtrip in January - we didn't get to see everything we wanted to.  We planned a quick 2 day, 1 night trip back to Wellington to finish up the few things we had missed on previous trips.

We flew up early on Tuesday morning, and with sunrise at about 7:30am, our 7am flight from Dunedin to Wellington provided some spectacular sunrise views.

While I had booked the plane, hotel, and had a mental list of places to go, Todd totally nailed the logistics of this trip.  He had us on the shuttle to Wellington within 5 minutes of getting off the plane, and we walked off the bus right at the entrance to the Wellington Cable Car.  Perfection!  The cable car runs (uphill) from the heart of the business district on Lambton Quay to the top entrance of the Wellington Botanic Gardens.  The walk down through the botanic gardens was lovely, and as we walked, we stripped off all the layers we had on - it's a lot warmer in Wellington than it is in Dunedin!

View from the top of the cable car track and the top of the Botanic Gardens

 

The Botanic Gardens includes a cemetery.

After breakfast at a cafe, we hit the local Canterbury of New Zealand store to stock on some iconic NZ sportswear.  Canterbury is the Nike of New Zealand.  It's the local clothing brand, and they seem to outfit everyone.  Every school sports uniform is Canterbury.  Many rugby teams wear Canterbuy including Australia's national team the Wallabies though ironically, the All Blacks don't (Addidas).

After checking into our hotel and dropping off our backpacks, we headed down to the waterfront to check out New Zealand's very first entry (and the first entry from the southern hemisphere) into the US Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon.  Called the 'First Light' house since New Zealand is the first country to see sunlight each day, the house was on display for tours before being packed up and shipped in containers to the US for October's competition.  The house is designed as a Kiwi 'bach' or small summer holiday home.  We took the tour and oogled over the house - it's awesome!

First Light house from the front

First Light house from the back

We can't wait to see it on the National Mall in DC in October!  Go New Zealand!

From there it was back to Te Papa to see the things we'd missed on a previous visit.  After a late lunch and a nap, we went to see a show by comedian Ben Hurley, who had a show in Wellington as part of the New Zealand International Comedy Festival.

Wednesday morning, we headed uphill to an extremely windy Mt. Victoria.  Mt. Victoria sits on a hill that's kind of in the middle of Wellington, separating the airport side from the downtown side.

Todd use the handy stitch assist setting on our camera to take these amazing panoramic pictures from the top - click on each photo to see a bigger version.

We walked down Mt. Victoria to Oriental Bay and back to the pedestrian mall to track down some graffiti we had spotted from the bus on our way up to Mt. Victoria.  Although we had seen Dunedin's little graffiti guy in Wellington in January, we didn't see it on this trip.  We did, however, find Wellington's version of the graffiti guy - bird on a skateboard with a helmet.  It was everywhere!

Even though we didn't find graffiti guy again, we did find some beautiful street art.

 

 

At the airport waiting for our flight back home, we got to see both of the 'local' national rugby planes.  First up was Air New Zealand All Blacks Crazy about Rugby plane.  Todd spotted it and went to take pictures, and when he returned to our gate, Australia's Quantas Wallabies plane was landing right in front of us!

 

If these planes (ahem, teams) went head to head, Air New Zealand would win (obviously).  Needless to say, this was the perfect end to our quick, little trip.