We travel south again today but stay on the North Island.

Palmerston North is 140 kilometres north of the nation’s capital at Wellington. I’d been living in the country about three years before I knew that there was another Palmerston (on the South Island) and that’s why the one we were living in was Palmerston North! Palmerston (South Island) has a population of around 800 people; Palmerston North has a population of around 80,000.

When I mentioned to the family that Palmerston North was the next stop on my haiku meanderings trail, I was bombarded with “Remember when…” stories – like, “… dinner sitting on the train at Harvey’s”; “… one of the kids planted Mum’s rings in the garden to keep them safe”; “… Mum (who had never been exposed to fire grates before living in New Zealand) thought that vacuuming  would be a good way to tidy it up and then nearly burnt the house down with an exploding vacuum cleaner after sucking up hot ash!” And the list went on!

My husband was a young lecturer at Massey University at the time and I was a student there working on my Masters degree. The children were pre-schoolers. It was a cold place in winter especially when the wind whipped up intensity as it was channelled through the Manawatu Gorge.

All of that tells you something about the heart’s ties to this pocket of the world but not much about the city. For information on that see the links below. I’ve included a link to Palmerston as well – for information rather than for comparison.

Palmerston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmerston,_New_Zealand

Palmerston North: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmerston_North
http://www.newzealand.com/us/palmerston-north/

And now the haiku:

Palmerston North

Rugby museum,
city gardens to explore
at Palmerston North.