Wellington Sights

Wellington was our first stop on the North Island of New Zealand, and we had a sort of sight-seeing day there.  There was quite a bit to see, so I’ve chosen to split all we saw into 3 blog posts.  Let’s get started with the first of them….

The first sight we saw was the Parliament building.  There is an interesting story about this building.  As it stands today, it seems a bit lopsided with the sort of round beehive looking building and the entrance off on the left side.  The building originally was to have a second beehive type of structure on the opposite end of things, but they ran out of money, so they ended up with just one!

Old St. Paul’s Church was the next sight on our itinerary.  It was built in 1866, and was the parish church of Thorndon and the Anglican cathedral for Wellington until 1964.  It now serves as a meeting place for all sorts of events, and is nondenominational.  I always find it difficult to think of these smaller churches as “cathedrals” as I always picture those as very large stately buildings.  The small church tower of Old St. Paul’s is charmingly small.  There were some interesting and pretty blooms throughout the church as well.

Inside Old St. Paul’s Church, we had a treat – all the lovely woodwork!  All of the inside of Old St. Paul’s is made from native timbers.   It’s a very good example of 19^th century Gothic Revival architecture.  We did notice several large cargo straps across the top portion of the building.  It turns out those straps were giving the building stability.  It was quite damaged from a structural soundness perspective by an earthquake that hit near Wellington in 2016.  They had been gathering donations to repair that damage, and those repairs are now scheduled for May – October, 2019.

Some of our other touring took us to locations high above Wellington, where we got a good view of the harbor there, and the airport.  Our timing was good!!  In the bottom image, I caught a jet taking off from the airport!

That evening, as we left Wellington, we had a lovely sunset.  I couldn’t decide between the 3 images shown, so I decided to include them all!

Enjoy!