Friday 19th March - Odds and Ends plus a telescope

 Friday 19th March - Odds and Ends plus a telescope

After our visit we went down to the Lake Tekapo village looking for a supermarket, garage and café.

The café was the base for the Dark Sky tours - a bit expensive for us at $149 each! However the coffee was good:-



Here it is from the inside looking out:-


In here was a remarkable telescope "The Brashear" built by John Brashear from Pennsylvania in 1894. It was gifted to the University of Canterbury 1n 1963 but they could find the funding to house it properly so it was put into storage for 50 years! In 2016 it was gifted to Tomorrow's Skies Charitable Trust. In 2019 Dallas Poll completed the restoration of this incredible piece of machinery. 

You can now view it in the café:-


I decided to walk back to the campground as it was such a beautiful day and I could use the ootpath instead of the road. There was an old road bridge that had been converted into a footbridge that carried to footpath over to the Church of the Good Shepherd:-


Once over the bridge I took a photo looking back:-





 On the way back to the campground Mary-Ann spotted this amazing sign on the gate into the campground:-


Here are Mary-Ann's friends tfrom the lake hat came to visit every day in the afternoon:-





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