Napier: art deco, palms and Norfolk pines

We left beautiful Napier more than a week ago, and I have been slow to get this post written because I've been sick. In our first two days in Wellington, I had a sore throat and a runny nose. I called the national Health Line to see if they wanted me to get a covid test. Within an hour of the phone call, I was on my way to a drive-in testing station in downtown Wellington. I had the test, for free, and got the negative results the next day.

The complication is that the Health Line person told me to self quarantine until I had a negative covid test AND 24 hours free of symptoms. This was perhaps related to the fact that I called them on our 13th day out of quarantine, and covid can have a 14 day or longer incubation period. I quarantined for 3 days in our hotel in Wellington, and still had symptoms. We couldn't stay on at the hotel, which was fully booked -- along with just about every place to stay in Wellington -- because of the big rugby cup game in Wellington between New Zealand and Australia. So we drove an hour and a half northeast to the Wairarapa Valley, a gorgeous agricultural valley between two sets of tall hills. We are staying at a cottage on a vineyard (photos in an upcoming post), and I feel well enough to take ferry to the South Island tomorrow (photos of the ferry trip in an upcoming post, too).

The rest of this post focuses on our two full days in Napier more than a week ago. Napier is the most visually charming small city in New Zealand, shaped by a big earthquake in 1930, which destroyed the city. A lot of it was rebuilt in the 1930s in art deco style. I had been there in June 2017 with my brother, who wanted to play the gorgeous golf course on a nearby headland, Cape Kidnappers. I thought Dave would love painting some of Napier's buildings, and he did.

One of the first things I noticed this time in Napier was the trees. On my first morning there, on the way to a public swimming pool, I drove on a street that looked like southern California. 

On the way home from the pool, I drove along the beach, and that road is lined with my favorite Norfolk pines (shown at sunset with the beautiful light).

Dave spent our two days in Napier painting like a maniac. Some of the charming art deco buildings:

The last two photos are the most photographed building in Napier. Here's Dave's watercolor sketch of the first photo, as well as his sketch of the sound shell and colonnade on the waterfront. 

I had seen a lot of the downtown art deco buildings with my brother in 2017, but this time Dave and I found an art deco neighborhood, about ten or twelve long blocks where maybe a quarter of the houses are art deco. I really enjoyed the diversity of the houses, and was particularly fascinated by the trim details. 

The earthquake in Napier influenced architecture elsewhere in New Zealand. In a museum, Dave found the following photo of Wellington's town hall. Before Napier's earthquake, the town hall had a tower. After the earthquake the tower was removed for safety in case of another earthquake.

Napier is a deep water port in giant Hawke's Bay. I mentioned in the last post that we saw miles and miles of tree farms as we drove across the widest part of the North Island. Most of those trees get turned into logs and shipped overseas, a lot to China. Here you can see so many logs they look like toothpicks.

The photo above is taken from a hill within Napier that you can see in the photo below. Beyond the hill is a long headland to the north which marks one boundary of Hawke's Bay.

Below is the view to the south. The headland you can see in this photo is Cape Kidnapper, the southern boundary of Hawke's Bay and the location of one of the most dramatic golf courses in the world. In June 2017, I spent a delightful 4 hours in the clubhouse looking out at the view while my brother played the course.

The beach at Napier was gorgeous in the lovely weather we had. A photo of Dave, and a look from the beach toward town, with the beautiful rows of Norfolk pines lining the street.

As we drove to Wellington just over a week ago, we saw a wind farm. A brief video to end this post: