New Brighton and Southshore

We had a really good flight over from Melbourne.  Jim in particular enjoyed sitting in the very front row of our Jetstar plane.  He had loads of room for his legs!

We came through immigration and customs without incident, collected our car and pottered into New Brighton to the supermarket.  Then we drove the ten minutes from there to our base for the next few days in Southshore.  I have to say that it's nothing like as spectacular as the place we stayed in Lyttelton; it's nowhere near as hilly and you don't have the views.  But we are a 30 second walk from the beach. There is a nature reserve at the end of the road. There is loads of (flat!) walking. It's very quiet.  And there is a very friendly cat who comes to visit.

Our backyard seems to include the Pacific Ocean:

This is our morning walk. We turned right along the beach and then went round into the estuary:

As you can see, the tide is out

We ambled in to New Brighton in the middle of the day. The Pier is being repaired but is open to visitors, so we walked along it.  We had a cup of coffee in one of the coffee shops.  We pottered around the shops. We went to the supermarket.  New Brighton  surprised us a bit. We had expected a thriving seaside town with lots of gift shops and tat shops.  In fact many of the shops are empty. Not sure if that's because we are out of season, although we are only just out of season. The suburb itself, and particularly Southshore where we are staying, seems quite affluent.

We went for a late afternoon wander through the nature reserve and back around to the estuary. The tide was in this time

We are enjoying our stay in our wee, bijou apartment.  The bathroom is lovely, the hot water is HOT, the water pressure is STRONG and the bed is very cosy for sleeping.  I am, however, finding the kitchen a tad frustrating. There is only one saucepan and it is quite small and one frying pan.  There isn't a dish drainer, nor is there an oven glove.  We do have a small oven, a couple of hot plates and a microwave, but the microwave is up so high that I can only just reach it.  Despite all that, I was quite pleased with our steak, roast potatoes, stir fried veg and mushroom sauce last night (although it was slightly treacherous trying to lift the bowl with the mushroom sauce out of the microwave!!!)

Right.  The sun is shining. The morning is getting on.  It might be time for another beach walk.  We'll turn left this time, I think