Wellington Botanic Gardens

I thought I’d wrap up my posts from Wellington with one of the beautiful blooms at the Botanic Gardens there.  It was a bit difficult for me to get my head wrapped around having to head north for warmer weather, but that’s what we did in the Southern Hemisphere!

Before we got to the flowers, Jeff noticed this lovely little waterfall hidden away along the walkway to the formal gardens.  Such a peaceful place, listening to the water gently flowing down the rocks.

The outdoor gardens were full of blooming roses and small fields of poppies, complete with bumble bees!  This is just a small sample of all the roses that were in beautiful bloom!  It was amazing how many more of them were blooming than we saw in Christchurch just a couple of days before!

We then headed into the greenhouse there to see some of the most vibrantly colored flowers we could recall seeing!  Even the most delicate flowers seemed to be vibrant in color, in a soft sort of way!

Altho I didn’t remember the names of most of the flowers, for some reason the name of the waterlily, Director George, stuck in my mind!  What a beautiful waterlily – and his supporting cast!

Enjoy!

Ride the Funicular and Views from the Top

One of the cool things we did was to ride what the folks in Wellington called a cable car to the highest point in Wellington.  However, this really wasn’t a cable car, it was what’s called a funicular.  There are 2 cars and as one goes down the very steep hill on which it’s located, it pulls the car at the bottom to the top.  We pass each other at the halfway point.

The Wellington Cable Car celebrated 100 years of service back on February 22, 2002.  I love the bright colors of the underground station where we boarded at the bottom of the hill.  It was also very cool as we rode thru the tunnel when we began our climb.  I think there were spooks and goblins on the walls to celebrate Halloween, as we rode this just after Halloween.

When we got to the top of the hill, and the end of our ride, we were at the highest point of the Wellington Botanic Gardens.  Up on the top, there are mostly trees and beautiful views of the city of Wellington and its harbor.  I especially loved the tree that had been trimmed to look like a rounded box hedge!

Altho we didn’t ride the car back down the hill, I was able to capture a shot of it leaving the upper station.  The route of this car only makes one stop, just a bit higher than midway down (and up) the hill.  The midway stop was to access a college, so folks didn’t have to walk up and down the hill.

Enjoy!

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!