Monday April 22, 2013
We have breakfast beginning at 6:30 am and luggage out at 6:30 am and ready to depart at 7:15 am. We are off and ready for our farm visit to see sheep shearing in action. It started out very foggy this morning with very little visibility of the mountains as well as the road. It is a bit brisk. We will be taking a couple of breaks before we visit the farm.
So far, not a good day for photos.
This is the church of the Good Shepherd where a number of weddings take place due to it being right over the water. The lake is hidden behind the church.
Here is a sheep dog figure that is a trademark for the area. It looks like a silhouette in the clouds.
We did get to the sheep farm. The owner and his wife are young. They have 4 young children to assist. He was a Philosophy Major and now this is his career. This farm is a third generation farm. His mother called him as he was taking his final exam since the farm was in great duress at the time. His father had tried his hand at dairy farming but didn't know the business very well. Charles the son and current owner was dropped into the business. He pulled the dairy industry together for a time and has since sold or leased that portion. Seems he made a good profit from the dairy portion and now has only sheep.
He has also written a children's book entitled "Sam & Poppy A Dag of a Tale".
He also writes professional books and gives lectures or goes to the farms to assist others in trying to make their farms profitable.
He has gone through training to shear sheep which takes about 5 years. They compare sheep shearing to running a marathon, therefore if you shear sheep for 4 days of 9 hours as day, then you would have to have the endurance of running 4 marathons. Whew!
The sheared wool is then somewhat sorted according to where it was sheared from. The thickness and fineness are decided.
The wool is then put in large bags and sold according to kilograms. The finer wool is worth more per kilogram than the thick variety.
After our little tour we were invited over to the homestead and his wife Abby had warm cookies and juice waiting for us. That was where he had his book available for sale and he was there to autograph it.
Their house is also one of those that had earthquake damage. That has been since 2011and is now almost ready for repair. Ir has taken some time to get lots of areas of Christchurch and surrounding towns back to normal. Their home is quite old and can not even be washed until repair is complete.
You probably can not tell, but there is plenty of bird poop all over the side of the house.
We toured the Antarctic Museum. It was very authentic with the 123 mph wind area. Wow!
and we thought WI was cold.
Brrrrrrrrrr
We were also able to see some penguins.
Then we had a nice dinner at a historic home (actually a large tent outside the home). This was due to earthquake damage to the historic home.
Now to get things packed so we can put our luggage out at 3 AM for our first flight to return to LAX.
Location:Holly Road,St Albans,New Zealand
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