More Kiwis

It was a sunny Sunday on the Banks Peninsula and we decided to spend the day in Akoroa. At lunch time we were joined - while eating really good fish and chips, at a table on the sea front, outside the shop where they'd been battered and fried (so one up on Rick Stein's, where there is no such facility) - by Mike and Annie Lewis.


Polite gulls waiting for titbits in Akoroa



Mike & Annie

Mike's parents had come from Restronguet in Cornwall, and he and Annie had been there recently to scatter his mother's ashes in the river Fal.
Annie and her sister had come to NZ from Glasgow with their parents in the 1960's when, she said, NZ really was the back of beyond and watching the TV in a shop window was regarded as entertainment.
Mike and Annie's home in Christchurch had been damaged in the earthquake but not structurally. However, Annie had a story to tell of being at work when the first big quake happened, and when so much dust rose through the floor that she was up to her knees in it. There was noone to clear up this mess except the workers themselves so they set to and did it.

When the second quake occurred the dust rose up to their knees again.