Our Big Maccas Adventure

4:30 am this morning found us, to our own surprise, just returning to Christchurch from the town of Timaru, 2 hours to the south. It was a spontaneous road trip to the Timaru McDonalds ("Maccas") with 3 other members of our Disney sing-a-long club (we watch a Disney movie after our young adults small group every Tuesday), the kind of thing we didn't think we'd do again after college but are plenty happy to be proven wrong about. We might have to grow up a little when we have kids, but as that's still years away...

Timaru is quite a nice little town of about 30,000, snuggled cozily up against the ocean roughly halfway between the cities of Christchurch and Dunedin, and was much cuter even in our nighttime escapade than we had remembered it from the time we passed through on the bus in December. What you don't realize from the bus is that the main road, following along the top of a cliff, bypasses what's arguably the city's most beautiful spot, Caroline Bay, which stretches from the base of the cliff down to the sea and is bordered on the south side by the Port of Timaru. We took a long stroll through the bayside park in the early morning darkness, wandering through the rose garden and searching for the outdoor roller rink which, unfortunately, remained inaccessible behind a large fence.

The timing for this little late-night trip is pretty amusing, as I haven't really been out of the city in the last six months but on Saturday will be embarking on a 5-day road trip that will take me back through Timaru on my way down to Dunedin and Invercargill with Ann-Kristin, who's preparing to return to her native Berlin in September. Bryan's got to work, so it will be just the two of us on a girls-only road trip. It's been suggested that we also make it a German-only week so that I can improve my decaying language abilities, but my vocabulary is so limited that I'm sure she'd get sick of "there is a cow" and "that house is red" long before we reach our first pit stop.

If I can only get my camera to recognize my memory card, I'll have pictures up for you around this time next week...

-Rachel