A fairly uneventful drive north took us to Christchurch. I say “uneventful” if you don’t include almost driving head on into a fleeing eagle eventful. Talk about gutsy. This thing just sat on the road and stared into the distance as I bore down on it at 100km/h. This sharply reduced to about 30km/h when I realised it wasn’t going to budge until the last moment, at which point it took off and flew along in front of me so I couldn’t accelerate. Then it looped over the van to land on the road where it had been before. I hope the view was worth it.

 Two more games of minigolf were played in the afternoon once we reached the city. One venue had two different courses – an indoor “3D” course which made full use of the funky glasses provided, and an outdoor Gold Rush course with some excellent mechanical effects. Both had a Wild West theme, so if you can’t stand piped country music, I’d recommend avoiding them. Likewise if you get headaches with 3D glasses, say away from the indoor course.

I won the 3D golf, while Lou did her best to embarass me outdoors. The indoor fairways are deep carpetting, so putting along them was a little strange compared to the courses we’d been used to.

 I did manage to get a cheer on the second hole outdoors. There’s an option to use a ramp to get your ball close to the hole and our “privae” rules state that any funky features have to be used if they’re present or suffer a stroke penalty. Lou took four shots to get her ball over the ramp. I took one shot, chipped the ball off the tee and landed it in the single deepest area of water on the course – more than a club’s-length away from the shore.

Just great.

I did manage to get it back without getting wet, though. That earned me another cheer from the assembled throng.

Overall, a very tricky course but richly featured. Watch out for the water traps and explosions, though!

 Later on we had a cine-fest and went to see both Over The Hedge (superb, it out-PIXARs PIXAR) and Click (not bad but a typically schmaltzy ending) before parking up in our now-usual spot and makig ourselves almost sick on stupidly cheap KFC.

We managed almost four hours’ sleep before the alarm went off at 2:30am, waking us in time to see England barely scrape a 1-0 win against poor opposition. I wish I’d stayed up for the Portugal/Holland game afterwards. At least that sounded entertaining.