One final trip - Day 7 (Part 1: Invercargill)

January 2, 2015

Today we spent a little time exploring Invercargill, since Brian served part of his mission here back in 1999. We drove around and found the flat where he had lived as well as the church building he attended. Once again, his memory was superb!

We also couldn't leave without visiting Queens Park, an amazing park and botanical garden about 80 hectares in size (equivalent to about 200 acres). I had no idea how large it was when Brian said we should visit and it took us a while to get through it. Sadly for me, it was quite cold and I was still without a jacket at this point due to my bad packing for our southern trip.

There were many fun and beautiful things to see. We started off with the animal enclosures because Brian didn't remember this part when he was here 15 years ago. So it was all new and exciting! Our first stop was to see the red deer with their velvet antlers, which I really didn't know anything about. So I took a picture to introduce them to you as well.

Brian says a lot of athletes take velvet supplements, but I just think that sounds weird.

Nemo

I guess the baby hasn't been named yet...

We also stopped to check out the wallabies. This picture is for you Richard Webb - and yes, we are still in New Zealand and not Australia!

Well timed pic of the guy in the background!

 This little guy took us back to the fun times at Willowbank Reserve in Christchurch. If you haven't done so before, I recommend you read my post from taking my parents there in December 2013. We had a blast feeding the animals there. Ah the nostalgia is setting in again!

After walking through the animal enclosures, we headed over to the rotunda. The walk was quite pretty, but it also started to rain so our walk became a little more fast-paced.

This would be a great venue for special occasions!

 There are also several sculptures around the park. Brian took a liking to this first one, and wanted a picture. I know you are all shocked that he wanted to be in a picture, but it's true!

We also took a picture of the sea lions because it reminded him of a picture Brian took of one of his mission companions (you know who are Wade Allred).

We also took a walk through the rose garden until it started to rain a little bit more heavily. I'll put extra pictures of the roses at the end of this post.

But this time, I was absolutely frozen so we started making our way back to the car. But we took a couple of final pictures on our way back.

A pretty little pond

Now that's a tall tree!

Brian said these cool pink and purple flowers are all over Invercargill, but I haven't seen them before. They may just be may new favorite flower given they are my two favorite colors!

This post is getting a little long, so I'll write about the rest of this day in a separate post. My mom loves pictures of flowers, so here are a few more that we took.

Daisies in the middle of summer! Who knew?