A Saturday Outing

We woke up today to a beautiful sunny day, forecast to be in the high fifies. (Remember, this is the equivalent of late February). So we decided to take a short outing and try a new road out of Dunedin. But first we wanted to go to the farmer's market, held every Saturday morning beside the train station. We've gone every other Saturday since we've been here. We buy a terrific venison pepperoni, tofu from a Chinese lady (the best tofu in town according to the Japanese husband of one of my co-workers), and lots of local vegetables like cabbage, onions, and leeks for great prices. The apples at the farmer's market are really cheap - NZ$5 for 5 kilos, which is about US$.32 a pound. They are the best apples we've ever eaten, which is hard for someone from Washington to say. (In fact, we have never eaten so many apples in our lives. We go through the 5 kilos, which is 11 pounds, in a little more than a week.) We parked across the street from the train station, close to the building in the first picture, the old prison which was decommissioned as a prison just this week. I wonder what they will do with it. It was built to imitate the old Scotland Yard in London. The second building is the law courts.

That's the train station in the background of the photo below, and one of our favorite apple vendors.

Today was the first time I've ever seen ostrich eggs. The sign says they're for painting, not for eating. Just to give an idea of how big they are, in the bags to the left of the eggs are unshelled walnuts.

These are duck eggs, and the eggs on the top layer have a bluish tint.

After the market, we took off on our drive, heading north and east out of Dunedin on a back road.

At one point the road was high above the harbor. This view below looks south and east, across the harbor to the end of the Peninsula at the mouth of the harbor. The colony of giant albatross that Dave visited a few weeks ago is at the end of the Peninsula.

The photo below is taken from the same position, looking straight south across the Harbor to the Peninsula. The ocean is behind the Peninsula. It's amazing how different the color of water can be at the same moment, depending on the angle of the sun.

The Waitati River is about 15 miles north of Dunedin, and there's a very little town there called Waitati. From the town, we headed towards the ocean, a few miles away. The first photo is near the mouth of the Waitati River and the second photo shows a beach right at the mouth of the river.