Ireland v. Italy

Dunedin, Invercargill, NEW ZEALAND: 29 Sept. - 5 Oct. 2011

To paraphrase the Black Eyed Peas' song that gets played in the stadium before each RWC match, as I boarded the plane in Wellington to fly south to Dunedin I got a feeling that the weekend was going to be a good weekend. And so it turned out to be. Everything worked out perfectly for my four days, starting with that flight (as we flew over Wellington Harbour I could see the NZ Navy sailing in to mark its seventieth anniversary; then I spent the rest of the flight looking down on the string of snow-capped mountains that stretched down the South Island) and ending with a fun night celebrating Ireland's 36 - 6 win over Italy.

Dunedin had everything necessary for a memorable long weekend:

sunshine (thankfully the repeated warnings that Dunedin would be freezing in September proved incorrect);

attractions ranging from the sophisticated (I was impressed by the city centre art gallery) and historical to the touristy (I walked up "the world's steepest street") and fun (on my tour of Cadbury's chocolate factory I had to wear two hairnets - one for my head, the other for my beard);

a festival (I scored a free ticket to the Port Chalmers' Seafood Festival);

lots of friends (Jen and Patrick also made it down from the previous game in Rotorua and Elaine and her posse flew in from Melbourne for the weekend); and

generous locals (I stayed with Ros and Mike, a couple I met briefly over beers in Vietnam, who fed me and provided a plentiful supply of beer and whiskey).

When you then add in the fact that thousands of Irish were in town for what turned out to be a game with a fantastic atmosphere in a state of the art stadium, you'll see why I left Dunedin with a very favourable impression.I headed further south to Invercargill, which when I arrived at 6:30pm on the Monday seemed like a ghost town, especially when compared to the bustling Octagon city centre of Dunedin over the weekend. I drove around the Caitlins area, with its green fields full of lambs and its rugged coast full with a history of shipwrecks, and onto Bluff, the southern end of the Highway 1 that runs the length of New Zealand from Cape Reinga in the north (where I was back in February), to complete a memorable week in the South Island. From Invercargill, whose airport is the closest to a town centre that I've ever seen, I flew back up to Wellington where Ireland will play Wales for a place in the semi-final.