East Coast Adventure: Dunedin to Oamaru

After our awesome West Coast Adventure, Erin and I decided to spend the following weekend exploring the East Coast a little bit. Our main destination was the Oamaru area.

First stop, though, was Dunedin to visit with the lovely Howells Family! Always a delight to see those two!

Then a quick visit to Tunnel Beach, of course. I think it was one of my favorite spots to visit. 

and it's not hard to see why

This time, however, there was a board blocking the entrance to the trail and it said 'closed for lambing'. I felt like this needed a little fact-checking before we completely gave up on the possibility of getting down there (It's a very large downhill hike to get to the beach). So a quick walk to the nearest house to ask about the lambing situation resulted in a solid answer of "there are no sheep down there. I don't know why that sign is there. Go for it, Mate".  And that's exactly what I wanted to hear!

So after a steep hike down, we got to play around at Tunnel Beach! 

Erin playing Queen of the Mountain. She had to fight the seagulls for the top spot.

So after our steep hike back out of Tunnel Beach, we headed on up the coast to the city of Oamaru. 

The Historic/Victorian District of Oamaru.  All the buildings were made of Oamaru limestone.

We had seen 'Pennyfarthing lessons' (that kind of bike is called a pennyfarthing) advertised, but the place to do it was closed... we were disappointed, but we quickly found other things to do. Oamaru was a very quirky town. The Victorian district is very quaint and neat with lots of interesting shops like these: 

Then, in direct opposition to the neat antique vibe of the old town, there's SteamPumk. I had thought Steampunk was just making lots of stuff out of metal and making it fun and interesting. Turns out, Steampunk has a lot more demonic/torture undertones! Lucky for us, the Steampunk HQ was right there in Oamaru, so we went to check it out.

They basically take old trains, boats, bikes, chairs, ...anything.  and then try to make it scary.

This display was one of the weirdest. The camera flash makes is look less intimidating, but most of this stuff is in a large dark warehouse, and you have to get pretty close to things before you can really see what's going on, then you're weirded out.

And there would be spots to stop and watch a bizarre short film, but your seats were dentist chairs and things like that. Just creepy.

But then mixed in the weirdness, there would be little things like this list of dietary habits of the 'down-trodden'. 

And this: 

This is the fearsome chap they mention in the sign.

Outside, they had more machinery to check out.

Back inside, we cut back through the main room to go down to the basement. But not until I had helped this guy with some internet research.

Down in the basement, there was a weird light show video that played on the brick wall.

I couldn't resist the opportunity to make shadow puppets.  The best part was when the light display made what looked like a hallway on the wall, and the bunny turned to look down the hallway. You probably had to be there to really appreciate how hilarious it was....

So being thoroughly uncomfortable by the end of the SteamPunk adventure, we needed to stop and appreciate this spring flowers that had bloomed along the street: