Time: 1 hour and 15 minutes
Distance: 5.4 km
Start: Lyttelton Information Center, 20 Oxford Street, Lyttelton
Finish: Same place (it's a loop)
Date: Friday 19th June 2020
Finish: Same place (it's a loop)
Date: Friday 19th June 2020
A freezing wintery morning in Christchurch with pouring rains forecast. Unsurprisingly there were a few (well, actually only one) reluctant customers this morning. We all rugged up and met at the Lyttelton information center and set off up Oxford Street to the cemetery. We had the "Lyttelton Walks" pamphlet and so with the help of the map and the track description we had some idea of the way. Still, it was all quite challenging due to a couple of missing street signs on both the map and the roads.
From the top of Oxford Street we took the small grassy path through the Anglican cemetery amongst the gravestones. They are old (1800's) and ramshackle and mark the remains of people with ancient first names like Alfred and Winifred and weird surnames like Tissiman and Lissiman. The earthquakes had knocked over many of the headstones but we did managed to find the Grubb's plot. John and Mary Grubb were with the first Pakeha settlers of Lyttelton.
On the other side of the graveyard we lost the next connector path but, by relying on our feminine intuition rather than the map, we easily looped back onto Jackson Road (via Canterbury, Somes, Cornwall and Upham) and down the hill to the Bridle Path then onto Cunningham Terrace with its cute early settler houses. We were eye level with the attic window of one house and we could peer nosily right inside to a super creative pottery studio. Awesome!
The return journey saw us on Godley Quay at Te Ana marina admiring the tauihu sculpture (by Whakaraupo Carving) and then wandering down London Street past the Grubb's cob cottage. The pouring rain had not eventuated and we had all warmed up (relatively).
The pamphlet claimed 3 hours for the loop but we were sitting in the Lyttelton Coffee Company drinking the ubiquitous flat white after a jaunty one hour and 15 minutes. Not bad.
