Saturday Oamaru

This morning at 9 am I was ready to set out for Oamaru. I packed my Jucy rental car, put the key in the ignition and tried to start the car. No luck. After several attempts to ring Jucy eventually I got through and eventually the AA arrived. By 10 am with the car started I headed off to Oamaru. At Palmerston I stopped. I remembered that my Aunty Mabel always addressed letters to me to Palmerston, not Palmerston North, and this was were my mail ended. While here I took a photo of a commenrative tower on a distant hill top that I had seen, only as a small black dot, on previous trips to Dunedin. With the aid of Canon stablisation and 30x telephoto I got this hand held shot.

The tower I had only seen a dot on the top of a hill.

Once in Oamaru I contacted David Harrowfield, an Antarctician, Historian, and author of many books. He picked me up from ther hotel about 1 o'clock and we had an interesting afternoon, finally dropping me off back at my hotel just in time for the TV news at 6 pm. First we went out to two Antarctic huts then to the wharf were Pennel and Atkinson from the Terra Nova landed in 1913, the wharf master's hut and the path they took to the Harbour Master's house and the post office where the report of Scott's death was sent back to England before being made public in NZ.

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The two Antarctic huts

the wharf where Pennel landed

The watchman hut.

The commemorative oak tree plant just after the landing

We discussed my book on my time at Scott Base and he gave me a copy of his "What Ship" Lieutenan Harry Pernnerl's Antarctic Legacy with an interesting signing comment and dated the 23/5/205 my 77th birthday.

From here I was introduced to the owner of Adventure books, Bill Nye, who I will be visiting tomorrow morning , then onto the Scott brewery where we talked, drank, and had a pizza. Tommorrow afternoon I am off to David's to see some Antarctic slides. He has all the slides from Jim Lennox-King, our leader at Scott Base in 1960 and Colin Bailey, our doctor. It will be good to see slides from my contemporaries.

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