New Zealand: Road Works
Mar. 25th, 2007 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscOne thing I didn't mention in my post about driving was the prevalence of road construction, or "works" as the signs call it. We seemed to encounter a lot of repaving activity, which may be related to the fact that, for all the scary aspects of some of the roads, bad pavement was not among them; NZ seems to take road maintenance seriously.
I was amused by the politeness of some of the signs. Where flagmen were active, there would be a sign saying "Please stop on request", as if you had an option (can you imagine such a sign in the US with the word "please" on it?), and at the end of the construction zone there would often be not just a sign saying "works end" but another one beneath it saying "thank you".
They use a paving method (now out of fashion hereabouts) that involves spreading gravel over a newly-tarred road, so that a recently-paved road has a lot of loose gravel on it (about which signs give appropriate warning, with graphics). By the way, the process we call "paving" is called "sealing" in NZ, so these gravelled stretches generally bear the warning "New Seal".
This caused some amusement in Napier, where our sea-view room also looked out over the street that runs along the beach, which had in fact been recently sealed, so there was a "New Seal" sign right below our balcony. Not too far along the beach there was a small "Marineland" attraction, and on occasion we could hear the barking of what I presume was a not particularly new seal.
I was amused by the politeness of some of the signs. Where flagmen were active, there would be a sign saying "Please stop on request", as if you had an option (can you imagine such a sign in the US with the word "please" on it?), and at the end of the construction zone there would often be not just a sign saying "works end" but another one beneath it saying "thank you".
They use a paving method (now out of fashion hereabouts) that involves spreading gravel over a newly-tarred road, so that a recently-paved road has a lot of loose gravel on it (about which signs give appropriate warning, with graphics). By the way, the process we call "paving" is called "sealing" in NZ, so these gravelled stretches generally bear the warning "New Seal".
This caused some amusement in Napier, where our sea-view room also looked out over the street that runs along the beach, which had in fact been recently sealed, so there was a "New Seal" sign right below our balcony. Not too far along the beach there was a small "Marineland" attraction, and on occasion we could hear the barking of what I presume was a not particularly new seal.
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Date: 2007-03-25 04:05 pm (UTC)The waiting group got a little bigger as cars pulled in behind us and we all got quite friendly and then this one guy went back to his car and pulled out his bag pipes and gave us a concert! I hate the sound of bagpipes but this was so magical I couldn't even considered being annoyed. My friend, John, got the most wonderful picture of the guy and it hangs prominately over my desk - you can even see it in this computer picture.
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