A Real Tour!

In Blip we are often given virtual tours of places where people live, especially now with the 'One Street' project. Through the pictures and the words we can often feel we are actually walking round a place.

Today I was able to do better than this and had A Real Tour!

TMLHereandThere offered to show me some of her city of Nelson, whilst I was staying there. So we spent a good part of today wandering the streets and I saw in real life all the lovely buildings she has been blipping. How brilliant it was to be taken round by someone who knows about, and is really interested in, the buildings and the history of a place. I got to see the parts I would never have found by myself.

We visited a couple of galleries and the lovely cathedral and then we walked up the hill to where all the grand houses were and some still are. We returned to the centre of town via many other buildings, and even managed to take in another gallery and a park.

We had lunch in this rather splendid house, which describes itself as 'one of the last surviving grand homes of Nelson'. It was built around 1879 for Charles Fowell Willett Watts, a surveyor, who had come out to New Zealand in 1841, at the time that Nelson was founded. It was built high on one of the hills surrounding the town and must have looked even more imposing then, when it was on its own, than it does now, surrounded as it is by houses and trees. We sat in one of the beautiful rooms in the house and had an excellent lunch.

Thank you so much Tanya for your time and the perfect tour of your home city.

Tomorrow we leave Nelson and take the ferry across to Wellington.