by On Thursday, a beautiful day, we went to Naseby where I would see my friend. Naseby is about 115 km from Moeraki – further than you think – so my parents decided to plump for fossil fuel for our trip down south, rather than taking the EV. I’d have liked to have made the trip on my own and spent longer with my friend, but I suppose as a passenger I could more easily admire the views. From Moeraki there’s a long beach that ends up at the delightfully named Shag Point, then you turn off at Palmerston – the real one, not the fake one north of Wellington – and follow State Highway 85, a.k.a. the Pig Root (yes, Root, not Route) into the Maniototo, which is where a gold rush took place in the 1860s. The peaks, some of which are volcanic, stood out brilliantly on such a perfect day.
We arrived in Naseby at 10:30. Mum and Dad spent two hours looking around the village which, at an elevation of 2000-odd feet, is perhaps most famous for its curling centre. In that time I had a good long chat with my friend who bought an old Presbyterian manse six years ago which is now done up beautifully. I met her husband who was working from home, and their lovely and very friendly dog. At one point we discussed her daughter who is on the autistic spectrum, who lives (almost literally) a stone’s throw away. They’ve certainly helped her navigate life with her condition. I’m likely on the spectrum too, and while I’m glad that my parents never saddled me with a label, some acknowledgement that I wasn’t “normal but being awkward” and wouldn’t “grow out of it” might have come in handy. My friend met my parents; if she’d mentioned this blog I’d have been busted like you wouldn’t believe.
We wended our way slowly back from Naseby; Dad wanted to find views he could turn into paintings. We stopped at Kyeburn (literally “Cows Creek”), a busy settlement during the gold rush but now almost deserted, although it still has a functioning library. Reading the plaques and information boards in these near-ghost towns, you see the great importance placed on education in the latter part of the 19th century. There are many streets and towns in the area that start with good old Scottish Dun-; my favourite was Dunrobin. We stopped in the interesting village of Dunback and stumbled upon a hippie enclave down one of the side streets. Eventually we were back in real Palmerston where Dad and I browsed a junk shop packed with old die-cast models. Outside the entrance were boxes of old LPs. We picked up two Top of the Tops records from the early 1970s; the next day Dad realised the tracks would be covers and almost certainly total dross. We picked up fish and chips at Palmerston – yum – and drove back to Moeraki where we watched lots of telly and I lost again at Skip-Bo. Not a bad day.
