Lyttelton: where we belong

We are in love with Lyttelton. It's a town of 3,000 on the other side of the port hills. It is the focus of our house search.

It's a hilly place, so walking around would be quite a workout. There are at least two trails leading from the town up into the hills. Both the Bridal Path and Stan Helms track lead up to Summit Road. Once you reach the summit, there is access to a whole network of trails stretching all the way out to Godley Head. We're hoping to explore some of these trails this weekend. If we lived in Lyttelton, we could do our morning runs on these trails. Imagine!

Lyttelton is a port town - it's the port where our container arrived from the U.S. and where all other containers arrive as well. We understand there are also Russian sailors who frequent the harbor. We think it'd be pretty cool to have Russian sailors around.

It would also be kind of cool to live near the general hustle and bustle of the harbor. We could watch them unload logs and stuff.

Lyttelton also has a nice assortment of bars and cafes. It's cheaper than Christchurch. Lots of artsy people have settled there. (We're not artsy, but it's nice to have them around, like with the Russian sailors). Most of the houses in Lyttelton are on crazy hilly roads like this one :

This is supposedly a two lane road, but half of it is taken up by parked cars. There's no way two cars could pass here. Luckily, there's not a lot of traffic in these parts. We were told by an estate agent that this particular road is "unoffically" a one-way street with "down" being the preferred direction, but apparenty the people who parked these cars in opposite directions didn't know that.

Lyttelton has an awesome farmers' market on Saturdays. Even though it's still winter (tomorrow's the first day of spring!) there were lots of veggies on offer at last weekend's market. The market is organized by Project Lyttelton, who also do a "time bank." We haven't gotten all the details on the time bank yet, but basically it's a volunteer time exchange. You mow my lawn, I'll walk your dog. That sort of thing.

Not everyone loves Lyttelton. Some think that it's cold and dark there. As the sun shines from the north, and Lyttelton faces south, it's true that it won't get as much sun as some places. But the Port Hills are not that big, and they certainly are not casting a perpetual shadow on the place. We will just have to be careful not to buy a house in a shady hole. There are plenty of sunny ones. And, probably because it's right on the water, Lyttelton does get a little chillier. Today for instance it was 17 (63 F) in Christchurch and 14 (57 F) in Lyttelton. A small difference, really.

We think the community offers more than enough to offset these drawbacks.