Visit Lovely Palmerston North!

I wrote the following late last night:

As I write this, we’ve just passed through the seaside town of Paraparaumu, on our way by coach from Palmerston North to Wellington. It’s approaching 11pm.

Where is Palmerston North? Nowhere in particular. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of it until our flight from Auckland was diverted there when dense fog in Wellington made it impossible for us to land as scheduled.

(This was the first time I'd ever experienced an aborted landing. We must have been within 100m of the runway when the plane picked up speed and started to ascend again. As for our landing at Palmerston North, I'm not altogether certain the airport there is really equipped to handle a Boeing 737: it seemed to me the pilot had to slam on the breaks in order to stop before the end of the runway.)

Palmerston is a small city in the middle of a large, relatively flat farming area – the largest expanse of flat land we’ve yet seen in New Zealand. It would have reminded me of rural Ohio, but for the hedgerows and the predominance of sheep.

(Last week, one of my colleagues joked that the one bit of flat land in Wellington is the cricket pitch in Kelburn Park, near Weir House. It’s very nearly true, if you don’t count the waterfront.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, this is a very strange end to a very good and eventful weekend. We flew up to Auckland on Thursday evening, then drove up into the Northland. We spent a day and a half exploring the kauri forests and the Tasman Sea beaches on one side of the penninsula, then crossed over to spend a little time in Paihia and Russell on the Bay of Islands.

There are many stories to tell, many, many pictures to upload, and many questions to answer. Why were my shoes so wet on Friday? Why was Russell once called "the hell-hole of the South Pacific?" . . . but that will have to wait until we’re back in Wellington and have had a chance to sleep.

Incidentally, there’s really only one road into Wellington, which is at the southernmost tip of the North Island. The highway and the railroad line both skirt the harbor on a narrow shelf of land that did not exist before the great Wellington quake of 1855.