Invercargill day 2 - not much to see here

Friday 3rd January

The day started with Coffee at J’s. Such a cool local cafe run by one of the many newly arrived Filipino people into the community. The coffee making down in Invercargill is incredible. I guess we put it down to the free/low cost education at the Southern Institute of Technology. This cafe was a little one, with few tables but a great theme and an awesome barista who was happy to talk to us and tell us all about living down here. We told him how Auckland was different.

We had decided that this was pretty much a ‘snow day’ especially after the day before when we felt somewhat travel weary and sick of each other. So, what to do with free Netflix? Binge watch Squid Games, season 1, of course.

To break up the day we headed out to try and find an i-site or something like it. No such thing to be found. It may have something to do with the museum under construction, but the DoC office was shut for Christmas, so no real help was on offer there.

The trip wasn't all in vain as we made our own luck and headed for visible things such as the water tower. A marvel of engineering in it's beginnings the water tower provided the gravity required for high pressure water, in a flat city. The city wanted the perks, but nothing ugly, so they made it look very pretty. But, like many brick/stone buildings down this way they aren't earthquake safe and have to be closed. The city's museum was in part demolished for rebuild for these very reasons.

Very near this is the famed Queen’s Park. What a marvel and delightful park - a wide avenue of mature trees and a hub of locals walking their dogs and happy to say hello. Logan, David and I had a lovely time. Logan had to try out the exercise part, missing his usual gym sessions.

We tried to locate something else that would be helpful, paid for parking, walked up and down the street, found one thing shut the other temporarily shut, so we just ended up finding another cafe, again with excellent coffee. The city also has some pretty cool street art but after all that defeat we came home, and made lunch.

More TV, back to binge watching after the break. All the walking, and sitting, drinking coffee brought about conversations and we wondered if we had made the best plans for our time on Stewart Island. To fit everything in, it looked like the only solution was to come home on a later ferry, so we rung them to see if we could move it, and that was easy as.

To get Jonty out of the dark and into the daylight we played the walker’s edition of Getting Lost. This game is always lots of fun, but we found there are bigger implications for getting lost whilst walking and a few wrong turns, or intuitive shortcuts can add in many minutes of unwanted walking. An hour later we came home.

Plenty of baking to get yet ready for our adventures on the island. I mucked up my mass measurement for the gf flour in the very-often-made brownie recipe and so to try and redeem it, it ended up more like cake batter and tasted like neither. A problem solved with ice cream

We made dinner, packed only what we needed for the island into two bags (one clothes, one food), firmed up some plans, and Logan and I took our preparatory Sea legs tablets.