Wellington: Middle of Middle Earth (Part 1)

We have finally scheduled a trip to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. We were very excited to to see another part of the North island as we haven't had as many opportunities to site see up there as we have on the South island. Our trip was short as we had to be back Sunday morning for our church obligations but there was still plenty to see and do in that time.

Travel

First things first. We got to the airport and checked in. For the first time, our assigned departure gate was on the first floor of the Christchurch airport. So we walked over and saw some gates where you have to walk out onto the tarmac to board the plane. Once our flight was called, we handed over our tickets and walked out to the plane. Notice I didn't mention going through security? Oh that's right, there was no security for our flight! How crazy is that? We couldn't believe it - not once did we have to show our ID or go through any type of metal detector. So very strange. Luckily, there were no terrorists on our flight and we made it safely to Wellington.

When we arrived in Wellington, I noticed that the side of the terminal had the phrase "Middle of Middle Earth" printed on it. I thought it was awesome, so I took the following photograph with a similar sign we found inside the airport the next day.

One of the awesome exhibits inside the Wellington airport

"The eagles are coming!"

After we got our rental car picked up, we drove to our cute little B&B in Lower Hutt and then set off for our first planned adventure: Porirua.

Porirua

Why would we want to go to Porirua, you ask? Well, Brian served part of his mission there and he said the best chop suey he ever had was in that town. So we set out in search of the take out shop. Needless to say, Brian's excellent memory was in tact and we found the shop pretty easily. Brian wanted to make sure it was the same owners, but we found out the current owners had only bought the shop a couple of years ago. We ordered chop suey anyway, but it wasn't the same. We were a little disappointed.

After eating our chop suey we also decided to find the chapel in Brian's area he served in. As Brian is indicating in the picture below, he served in East Porirua.

LDS chapel in East Porirua 

The Beach

We drove back to our B&B and went down to the end of our street to look at the beach. We had a pretty sweet place to stay! Lucky for us, the weather was pretty nice that evening although the weather forecast said it was going to be cold and rainy.

Doesn't the sky in these pictures look amazing? And the water was so calm in this part of the harbor. It was a great way to end the night. Well, almost. We decided we were hungry a little bit later after not finishing the chop suey so we headed over to a restaurant recommended by the B&B owners and had ourselves some appetizer and dessert (mmmm...passionfruit cheesecake with a caramel raspberry ice cream! my mouth is watering now just thinking about it.)