Day 24 Oamaru to ChristChurch

We were on the road by 9:15, as we had no great plans for the day other than to drive to Christ Church that was some 275 kms to the north. The roads on the South Island are for the most part much better than the North Island. While all the road surfaces are excellent the roads in the south tend to be straighter and you can travel quicker. In our almost 4 weeks in NZ I think we have seen 2 or 3 police cars cruising the “highways”. Traffic enforcement does not seem to be a high priority. On our drive north towards Ch Ch we stopped at Moeraki to see the boulders. The boulders are spherical and litter the beach and are left behind as the beachfront cliffs erode. The Maori legend is that there are food baskets left behind from an ancient shipwreck. We continued north along a very boring highway # 1 through the Canterbury Plain. Ch Ch appeared and we were able to navigate the myriad of one-way streets downtown to find our motel in a trendy area called Merivale. I should point out that I cannot remember one city or town where the main highway we were traveling one actually bypassed the city. Everyone go directly through town so some of the streets are quite congested. I also do not remember being on any motorways on the South Island every major road has been a two-lane highway no divided highways. The other interesting fact is that other than Auckland we have not seen very many shopping malls. Without exception the vast majority of stores are small shops scattered along the main streets. We have seen a scattering of big box stores but they appear to be mostly grocery or home improvement stores with not a Wal-Mart to be seen. For our afternoon in Ch Ch we did a self-drive tour over the port hills driving along the shores of the Avon River estuary before driving over the peninsula hills to Lyttleton via the summit road a twisty narrow and very steep track that is called a road. The views were incredible and we finally headed back to town around 5:30. We decided to pick up pizza for dinner and found a trendy Italian restaurant and ordered our take away from a waitress who was from Sudbury. She had been in NZ for 5 years but had finally decided it was not for her and was making plans to return to the cold white north. After dinner we went for a walk and found a small café had our flat white coffee and returned to a good nights sleep.