Murchison and surrounds

Our seventh night's stay was in the town of Murchison. Murchison gets its own post because it is really hard to adequately convey the amount of local flavor that we got there in just a few pictures.  When looking at the south island on a map, Murcison gets a fairly big dot relative to the towns around it. This could lead you to think that it would be a town with plenty to offer, and a good place to stay the night after you'd been driving and hiking all day. However, once you're on the island, you quickly realize how relative the size of dots actually are. For example, you might pass through another dot on the map and not even know you've gone through the "town." It's possible also that you could hear from a local "Murhcison isn't really a place you stay. It's more like a place you stop for lunch and then move on." Something close to this exact phrase was said to dad by someone chatting with him about our trip. So needless to say, I was getting a bit anxious about what lie in store for us during our night there. (for the record, I chose Murchison to stay because it was the closest town to the Nelson Lakes without driving the two hours to Westport.) I didn't need to worry though. Turns out Muchison is a perfectly lovely place to stay if you manage to get a spot in one of their four accomodation options, and if you manage to get in the door at a restaurant for some food! We actually had a really fun time there, and I for one, thought this is what it must have felt like to travel around in the 40s or 50s. We were staying at a motor lodge-like place. This was our check-in experience:  

Like many of the places we stayed, the manager lived onsite in a room attached to the main lobby. She had about four cats who were pretty excited to have some visitors. I asked her about where we could eat dinner. She said, "You can eat at one of the two hotels in town (hotels being like a pub, not what we think of as a hotel). They start cooking dinner around 5:30 and they stop when people stop coming in." Well, you can bet that we were out the door and down the street at 5:30 to make sure we got a meal!  We walked across the mostly deserted main street to get to the hotel where we ate - the other one apparently had decided not to open at all that night! The hotel was a restaurant/cafe, bar, and bottle shop all in one.  To order, you walked up to the window at the kitchen. We were pretty much the first people in for the dinner hour, and were the only people for a while. Nonetheless, they made us take this buzzer so we could be called up to the window 10 feet away when our food was ready! We got a good laugh out of that.  Mom and Dad's sandwiches had these super tall sticks in them, for reasons unknown.

 

But we were so happy to have a hot meal and we really enjoyed watching the local people come in. I got this cute pic of Mom & Dad:  

  And not a moment too soon, because things went downhill behind them the next second.   

After dinner we walked the quiet town, most of which probably hasn't changed for the past 50 years.   

 

And then we walked to the end of our street and discovered the river was right behind our motel. That's the thing about New Zealand - you discover amazing places when you least expect it!