A Town Named ROSS

Arriving at a village near tea time we decided to stay for the night as we rather liked the name of it: Ross. It seemed like a nice little place with a pub, a pond and very little else except lots of big signs with my name on it. Parking the car at our spot for the night on the local playing field we popped across the road to the pub to sample the local ale and took to a seat outside where we were joined over the following couple of hours by the owner and then several of the regulars as we sat under the porch with our drinks. Drawing the evening to a close reasonably early, we bid goodnight to our new friends and settled down for the evening in the car.

Our first rainfall arrived that night and the clouds had clearly been storing it up as we looked out the car windows in the middle of the night to see the water rising around us. We moved the car to the Tourist office car park and settled down again. The following morning, we are getting ourselves into order when we bump into one of our friends form the previous evening, Aireeni the pottery artist who is having her early morning fag.

Ross is a goldmining town, still actively mining gold today but very reminiscent of it's heritage. Sadly for Ross, the tourists really only stop for the toilet before carrying on past. They don't see the heritage walk which meanders through the hill sides past hundred year old tunnels leading into the old gold mines. No action has been taken to prevent tourists from wandering in to them, because so few tourists actually take the time to explore them. You can squeeze in as far as you dare, passed the pit props until you decide they are too rotten. We then popped back down to the town for breakfast and popped into a little cafe run by Marcus who runs the cafe from the living room of his house and has converted his garden to grow as much of his own produce as possible. After a fine sandwich and coffee we promised to spend the second night parked in his drive way if we stayed and left with handfuls of his garden produce to take on our travels and cook up as we went, gratis. Then round to Aireeni's for afternoon tea and to see her workshop and we decided Ross was quite possibly the finest town in the world. That said, we had an agenda and decided we owed it to the rest of New Zealand to find the second best town if we could.