Not too much to report today on this our last full day in New Zealand. We woke up to a very nice day. The camp owner said the wind had changed from the east to the northwest and this meant it would be a nice day. He was so right! The temperature got up to 26C with the wind providing little cooling from the heat of the sun. We went into Christchurch and signed up for a tour of the Antarctic Center out by the airport. It was a fascinating experience and the center is right across the road from the US/NZ/Italian headquarters for all the expeditions mounted by these 3 countries to the Antarctic. There is a large building where anyone going to the Antarctic has to stay for 2 days and where they are fitted with the clothing they will need in order to spend time in the Antarctic. They are fitted and then go into cold rooms to be tested on the effectiveness of the clothing. As our guide said, there are no storerooms in the Antarctic to get a change of clothing if something does not fit. The driver who took us out to the site was telling us about the earthquakes and said not so many buildings actually fell down during the first earthquake but after the second, more than 1000 buildings were condemned. He said the government set up the Earthquake Commission to deal with insurance claims and promised a 6 week turnaround on claims. He said his claim which was relatively small took 11 months to settle and most of the big ones are still left to be settled. There has developed 2 camps in regards to how the Christchurch Cathedral should be dealt with, those who say pull it down and build a modern facility and those who want the old church resurrected. The driver was very much in the "rebuild it" category. I talked to a fellow at the Antarctic Center who was one of the "build a new one" group. It was his opinion that it would take too much money to rebuild it and the money could be better used elsewhere. Jean was able to get time with the penguin keeper at the center and was taken backstage to see the little blue penguins and was also lucky enough to see a baby blue penguin. The penguins there are all rescued penguins who would have died if left in the wild. Now they serve useful lives in educating the public. Usually they allow only 20 minutes for people to see backstage but Jean was the only one so she got about 45 minutes. The keeper was from Pennsylvania and is working on a masters on the penguins. When we got back to the maggot we began packing and cleaning up. We will probably go to the maggot drop off site at about 9:30am as it is usually pretty busy. We fly from Christchurch to Auckland at 1:30 and then fly to Rarotonga at 5:30. We leave on the 17th from NZ and arrive in Rarotonga on the 16th as we pass over the dateline. I am not sure if I will be able to blog daily when we get to the Cook Islands but I will try to get at least a couple of days reported.