Valentine's Day, Elvis Arived & Christchurch

Valentine’s Day, Elvis Arrived & Christchurch

The last cruise Leila was our star – this time Dennis became Elvis. He was picked from the audience, taken to the front of about 500 people, given a leather jacket, a blow-up guitar, and a mask complete with hairhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif and sunglasses. He competed with 2 other men also picked from the audience to find out which one could impersonate Elvis the best to the tune of, “Ain’t Nothing But A Houndog”. Dennis won. We can’t tell if he was the best or we could yell the loudest, but he won a Princess Cruise Line Cap……between the 6 of us we probably have 20 hats.
Napier was an Art-Deco style little city. The buildings were built in the 30’s. The cars were old, the art shops had the art-deco flavor. Even some of the men with their suspenders, white shirts, and straw boaters were in keeping with the 30’s era.
Valentine’s Day. One of our favorite places in Napier was a Dollar Store, where we found $2 red men’s ties and glittery, red rose corsages for the Golden Girls. All decked out we went to the Sterling Steakhouse on board for our Valentine’s dinner. The steaks were great, they gave the Golden Girls a red carnation as we left the dining room and then we went dancing. First time this cruise.
Christchurch. We started out by hoping on a bus that was going to take us straight to the town square of Christchurch for $15 Round Trip each. We made it to town square, walked around a craft fare and decided we needed more excitement. We found a “deal”. We could go for a trolley ride, go on a Punting boat, and then ride a gondola up to the top of the mountain that separates Christchurch with Lyttleton where our ship was docked. We thought this would be great fun. It was actually quite a challenge. We rode the trolley, to the Punting boat for a beautiful ½ hour ride. Then we expected to hop on the trolley and go to the gondola. The trolley conductor told us “STOP 8” would be the stop for the gondola. We got off not near a mountain, but right down town. We then asked, “Where do we go to get the gondola”? The conductor pointed to a couple who had gotten off the trolley just before us and pointed and said, “Follow them”. Unfortunately, they didn’t know where they were going. We then asked a street vendor who gave us directions implying that we could walk to the gondola. We weren’t comfortable with that information so we waited for another trolley and asked another conductor. He pointed to a bus stop and said, “catch Red Bus #28”. We went to the bus stop, got on bus #28. To our surprise our ticket to these events didn’t include the cost of the bus ride, but the bus driver assured us that we had a round-trip ticket back to town. The bus ride took us 30 minutes to the other side of the mountain to catch the gondola. The ride was very scenic both on the bus and on the gondola; however, we decided we didn’t have enough time to retrace all of those tracks. We tossed the round-trip tickets and got a free bus back to the ship. We felt like mushrooms, you know, feed us BS and keep us in the dark.
We’re back on the ship heading out to sea.
Six BMK Travelers