Sunday 25/02
Good breakfast with plenty of fruits.
We take the car to go to town. Christchurch is the country’s second-largest city (350,000 inhabitants).
We do the (hop-on hop-off) Tram City Tour, a 17-stop loop showing the city highlights including Cathedral Square. Christchurch is a city in transition, coping (creatively) with the aftermath of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes that left 186 people dead.
Unfortunately the ’Re:Start Mall’ no longer exists (they’ve already dismantled most of it). We wanted to see this labyrinth of shipping containers that was the first retail “mall” to reopen in the CBD postquakes.
I go to the i-SITE. They confirm that the main road between Christchurch and Kaikoura is closed but there is an alternate inland road.
We go back home. We won’t visit the (apparently stunning) Botanic Gardens, the Art Gallery or the International Antarctic Centre. We’ve been on the road since Auckland and we are keen to stay home a bit (before another 11 days in camper).
We eat a good salad.
Kids do 2 homeschooling sessions while Isabelle tries to find the best way to fly to Chile: going to Easter Island on the way (via Tahiti) or after (from Santiago). I catch up with the blog.
We do more than 4 washing machines today. Ludivine says: “I can’t wait to be in Belgium to get our clothes in the dryer and ironed”…
I prepare pasta for dinner.
By 10pm the kids are in bed. Isabelle works on her laptop when it suddenly stops working! She’s very worried. Let’s wait until tomorrow morning.
I work till 1am.
Monday 26/02
Today it’s a full day off for the kids. It has been quite a while since the last one and we took “advantage” of the bad weather forecast to schedule it today.
Isabelle and I go to a repair shop for Isabelle’s laptop. They are not very optimistic and they anyway have to send it to Auckland if we want to have a chance to recover the data on the hard disk. We decide to keep it; we will send it to Belgium, where it will be apparently easier to recover the data of the (SSD) hard disk. We go to ‘Noel Leeman’ shop to buy a new laptop. We buy a good Acer.
We are back home around 11am, ready to start a (hopefully) productive day off. For Isabelle, it will be mainly installing her new laptop and booking flights to Chile. I will try to figure out how to visit the Macchu Picchu since everybody says that it must be book 6 months in advance… I’m afraid we are already very late.
We all spend the entire day on our electronic device(s). We don’t go out of the house. The weather is anyway not great.
We eat a salad for lunch and Isabelle prepares a nice meal for dinner: pork with apples and potatoes.
Isabelle and I work till 1:30am.