In Town Today

I drove into town today from Richmond Hill Bed and Breakfast to do lots of administrative things, not least the annual car service.  I had to wait for four hours while it was being done, which gave me a great opportunity to see a friend and have a treat of a yummy tapas lunch at a restaurant inside the entrance to the Botanic Gardens, and en route I saw two somewhat forbidding statues of Superintendants of Canterbury in the early days - the 1850's and 1860's - one inside the Gardens, and one just outside.  They looks so immensely self confident and as if they knew all  was well with their world, and yet they had only been out here for a few years and were real pioneers.  The first settlers lived in tiny A frame houses, one of which is in the Christchurch Museum, which is at the other end of the path from the restaurant my friend and I were in.

It says on this statue 'Wm Sefton Moorhouse  - to whose energy and perseverence  Canterbury owes the tunnel between the port and the plains'.    The tunnel is almost 2km long.  I know because I measured it when I drove through last week from Lyttelton.  Quite a feat in a very young country.

On to another job.....