"All Aboard!"

We had a less than boring weekend - ten year anniversary for Saady and I which meant ringing Gran and Grand-dad Wigs in for babysitting. So Saads and I had a lovely dinner at White - where the food was great but the beer was...Its a bit crazy to think that five years has passed since a long weekend in Paris - and a decade since we lived in a mouldy flat in Abel Smith St.

On Saturday we decided to take Liam on another discovery channel trip to MOTAT - the Auckland Museum of Transport and Technology. Lots and lots of machines of yesteryear - good 'wholesome' fun. Such a place always comes complete with a few trainspotters - hell often they're the ones who put the volunteer work in to make these places great - and Liam and I just happened to get cornered by one of these in the tram shed. With the thought of a crazy man who wanted to engage Saads and I in an endless monologue about the Waitaki Hydro-Scheme still fresh in my head I ended the conversation with what I call the 'dump and run' - regurgitate some fact you've read on a placard five minutes earlier to pretend you care but finish with the line "but thanks for that info" and start walking away. The pearl of wisdom I recycled is that they have a few restored trams that still run at MOTAT from around NZ. The Wellington ones run on a narrower gauge than the other ones because the cities topography required narrower streetcars. So MOTAT has tracks for both rail gauges. Facinating stuff...

As we discovered there are actually two parts to the Museum separated by a kilometre of Western Springs Park and Zoo - and the second part has a rail track that was going to be running an old steam engine on Sunday (more trainspotters) so sans Gran we headed back for more. They hitched a couple of old NZR coaches to the old shunter in the photo and steamed up and back on the the short track - a bit like the one at Silverstream Railway Museum - too short I thought to work up anything to expectorate. But the sight and smell of a coal burning engine are quite something I think - a portal to the industrial revolution - and Liam loved it (apart from the screaming kids) so I'm going to take him on Puffing Billy when we're in Melbourne later this year.