skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Before I get to the view pictures, I had to post these cute, friendly pansies. When I took all the pictures for the last blog post, somehow I forgot to get a picture of these pansies, and they have given me a lot of pleasure since we moved into our new house two weeks ago.
Our house is on a very steep hill, but we are near the bottom of the hill, which means we can bike into town. But we're the fourth house up from the bottom, which makes us elevated enought to see over the neighboring houses. From our dining room, we can see up into the surrounding hills.
Below is a wide angle shot of our view to the northwest, the view from the dining room and deck.
The next two photos zoom in on the view to the northwest. Guess what, there are sheep on those hills.
Straight west of our house, on the other side of the valley, is a wall of trees. Perhaps they will show good colors in the fall. The photo below was taken from the deck, but this is basically the view from the kitchen window that we see when we wash dishes.
The deck wraps around the west side of the house, and the photo below looks south from the deck. This is the view Dave sees from his studio, which is on the southwest corner of our house.
No series of photos from the windows of our house would be complete without a view from my office. As I sit at my computer, I look west towards the wall of trees. But I can also look down the street to the gas station on the corner of our street and the main road that comes up the bottom of the valley. (For the curious, we have BP, Shell, and Mobil stations that use the very same logos on their signs as in the US. The one down the street is called Caltex, and it uses the Texaco star. Those are the four main kinds of gas stations that we can remember seeing here. Gas - called petrol here - is NZ$1.70 per liter which equals US$4.89 per gallon, and of course it is steadily rising all the time. It takes NZ$70 , which is US$53, to fill up our Honda Civic gas tank.)
To get to the university, we go down the hill to the gas station, turn left on the main street there, and go about a mile south past the Botanic Gardens. It's very slightly downhill, just the amount you notice on a bike but not in a car. Downtown Dunedin begins about a half mile beyond the university, still flat. We wanted to live in this neighborhood so we could ride bikes around town, and we have biked somewhere almost every day for the past two weeks. It's wonderful.
I left Seattle on the summer solstice, right when the weather was starting to get nice, and plunged into winter here in the Southern Hemisphere. Now it's payback time. After waiting a year and a half for summer, it's feels great to have long, sort of warm days. Dunedin seldom gets really warm, but many days are sunny with high temperatures in the high 60s. It's a great climate for flowers, and they are blooming everywhere. Our new house has wonderful bushes and perennial flowers, so I just went and took pictures to cheer up you northern hemisphere people dwelling in cold and darkness. Our new house has a really nice indoor-outdoor flow through a big sliding glass door in the dining room.
Below is our cute mailbox, a typical mailbox design here. You can't see that the section under the roof, the triangular part, is open front and back, and that's where the newspaper gets delivered. The lower part has a slit in the front and opens on the back, and that's where the mail goes. 
The next photo shows one of our two heat pumps which power the heating system and the hot water tank. There is no natural gas on the South Island, so people heat their houses with electricity, coal, propane, or kerosene. Electricity is obviously the cleanest and least smelly, and heat pumps get more heat from a unit of electricity than plug-in heaters do. Electricity is expensive here, about three times more per kilowatt hour than in Seattle, so winter heating bills are in the hundreds of dollars.
Hydrangeas are starting to bloom all over town. We have several that have buds, and one of them, a lacy-capped version, is just starting to bloom by our driveway.
Below are four more photos of flowers in our garden, some of which are unfamiliar to me.
Two weeks ago Dave and Mike took off for the northern part of the South Island. It was Mike's last week with us, he had finished the first draft of his master's thesis, and he wanted to see some more of New Zealand. They drove 10 hours north in one day. At about three quarters of the way, they stopped to look at the beach at Kaikoura. There are lots and lots of seals in the next picture.
They spent the night in Nelson, a fairly major city, and then the next day went west to Abel Tasman National Park. One of the must-do things in that park is to take a boat to pick up a trail that is accessible only from the water. The next photo was taken from the boat. The rock is called Split Apple Rock.
The boat dropped them off on a beach. Mike, Dave and the others on the boat were handed a map and shown where to meet the boat four hours later. They had to walk briskly to make it on time to the other boat. The trail led over headlands with views of beaches, then across the beaches, then back up over more headlands. Below are some photos of the hike.
On their second day up north they went on a two and a half hour guided bike ride. Dave, Mike, and two guides were dropped off at about 800 meters altitude, and the trail led them down almost to sea level. The trail was mostly downhill, over roots and other fairly significant obstacles, very narrow and often with a big drop off on one side. Dave said if he had known how challenging it would be, he probably wouldn't have gone. But he definitely had a sense of accomplishment afterwards. They learned a mountain biking skill of knowing when to lift off your seat and carry your weight on your pedals when going over bumps, which lowers the center of gravity and makes the bike more stable over challenging terrain. Dave said he spent a lot of the bike ride with his weight on the pedals. It rained the last part of the ride, and in the last photo, you can see LOTS of mud on their legs.
After the trip, Mike had a couple more days with us. On his last night, we went out for dinner and then took a drive up to Signal Hill. Dave and I had gone there soon after we arrived six months ago (and posted a bunch of photos on the blog after the visit), but we hadn't been back since then. The water you can see is Otago Harbour with the Peninsula in the background.
The day after Mike left, we moved to the house we bought a few months ago. (That's why this post is so long after the trip -- all my spare time recently has gone into getting our new house organized.) One of the last things we did in our rental house was take photographs of the tree growing in our neighbor's yard. It's a Southern Rata, a tree native to New Zealand, which blooms with red flowers at Christmas time. So this is the last photo of the beautiful view from our rental house.
Our house is on a very steep hill, but we are near the bottom of the hill, which means we can bike into town. But we're the fourth house up from the bottom, which makes us elevated enought to see over the neighboring houses. From our dining room, we can see up into the surrounding hills.
Below is a wide angle shot of our view to the northwest, the view from the dining room and deck.
The next two photos zoom in on the view to the northwest. Guess what, there are sheep on those hills.
Straight west of our house, on the other side of the valley, is a wall of trees. Perhaps they will show good colors in the fall. The photo below was taken from the deck, but this is basically the view from the kitchen window that we see when we wash dishes.
The deck wraps around the west side of the house, and the photo below looks south from the deck. This is the view Dave sees from his studio, which is on the southwest corner of our house.
No series of photos from the windows of our house would be complete without a view from my office. As I sit at my computer, I look west towards the wall of trees. But I can also look down the street to the gas station on the corner of our street and the main road that comes up the bottom of the valley. (For the curious, we have BP, Shell, and Mobil stations that use the very same logos on their signs as in the US. The one down the street is called Caltex, and it uses the Texaco star. Those are the four main kinds of gas stations that we can remember seeing here. Gas - called petrol here - is NZ$1.70 per liter which equals US$4.89 per gallon, and of course it is steadily rising all the time. It takes NZ$70 , which is US$53, to fill up our Honda Civic gas tank.)
To get to the university, we go down the hill to the gas station, turn left on the main street there, and go about a mile south past the Botanic Gardens. It's very slightly downhill, just the amount you notice on a bike but not in a car. Downtown Dunedin begins about a half mile beyond the university, still flat. We wanted to live in this neighborhood so we could ride bikes around town, and we have biked somewhere almost every day for the past two weeks. It's wonderful.
