the queen travels: The Wanderers

2 The Wanderers

We got up March 11, Saturday, (to us … our friends at home are a day behind us) and decided as it was again kind of crappy weather, we’d head to the Aukland Harley shop. I heard a T-shirt calling my name. Wouldn’t you know they’d have one that would fit. Yep. I bought it, and have now added another to my collection.

There were some super-nice folks here. Everyone so far in Aukland has been very nice and the drivers are quite courteous.

We took the vehicle back to the hotel as we want to be sure we get our money’s worth on our paid parking.

From there it was time to do more walking and find the Sky Tower. We walked around, but of course, when you’re on the ground looking up you can’t see it. Too many buildings were in the way. But if nothing else, we are persistent and found it.

This beautiful tower is 1,076 feet tall. It took two years, nine months to build and cost NZ$85 million. It's about the weight of 6,000 elephants and is mostly concrete with reinforcing steel and 260 panes of glass.

There were a few folks bungee jumping. No, thanks. But I sure do like to watch. The tower awaited and we paid our entry fee and up the elevator we went to one level. We got out and hopped the elevator that takes you up to the sky deck. A 360-view awaited us.

We stood at the sky deck, 60 stories up, at 722 feet.There's nothing like a view of the city from above it.

Clouds moved in and moved out, giving us glimpses of the buildings below us. We could see all over, and it was a beautiful sight. We stayed up for a while, and watched a few jumpers.

Off the edge he went.

There were also some doing a catwalk tour around the tower a level beneath us. We hadn’t opted to do that … we just wanted our look and then to continue on walking and wandering around.

This gentleman was playing to earn his coin. That was a nice change from just seeing people sitting on the street corners with a cup out begging for change. I rewarded him with a coin.

We did have to wait at the bottom and watch a couple others jump.

We took another walk and found this area where people were tossing a ball, kids running amuck.

I really like the buildings that have a bit of color to them.

We found a great little park and wandered through it. There were some fun things for kids to play on and they were quite different from things we see at home.

The kiddy area had a lot of things that I would have liked to have played with.

At the far end from where we came in there was a statue of Moses. I'm impressed that there's very little vandalism to these things that we've seen. Mostly it's only been on the sides of buildings, if any.

At the end of the park we had to climb steps to come up and out the other side. It sure seemed like there were a lot of steps, but we got up and went through an alley way with some little shops and cafes.

There are a lot of those types of things here, which makes for a very charming city, even if it is big. How big? In 2016 there were 1.5 million people in the Aukland metropolitan area. Wow. That’s a lot.

This building looked like a little hut. There are a lot of interesting things tucked away here.

In with the new, but there are some old, beautiful buildings that add charm to Aukland, big city that it is.

There are all of those quaint shops and small cafes, and then the big, fancy names that you associate with big money.

Fancy, schmancy.

They're all here.

This guy was selling these kites and his daughters had said that outside the store had to be decorated brightly to draw attention to them. So they did ... and it certainly did draw our attention.