Jonas Ng recently took a team over from NZ to Germany to check out the new Frankia and Dethleffs models and their new features.
While he was there, he visited the Hymer Museum and took these amazing pictures. Hymer is the parent company of Dethleffs Motorhomes and Caravans.
This is the second of two posts. Todays one is the one of the early BMW Motorhomes. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.
Click here to see earlier Dethleffs first caravan
Thanks Jonas!
One of the great new secrets of Mangawhai is the Motorhome parking behind the history in the new Mangawhai Museum.
It’s a huge area and perfectly flat and also has the dump station and for a donation, fresh water.
We arrived here fresh from having a look around Bennetts chocolate factory and the old Mangawhai shops and were keen to check out the Museum.
In a brand new purpose built building with a cafe, it is really well done and well worth a look through. There is a lot of history on the Niagara sinking and a huge amount of items donated by the founding families of the the area.
After visiting the Museum, we unhitched the bikes and went for a bit of a trek around the new housing areas opposite the Museum. As we left, we saw our caravan neighbours from the pub carpark the previous night arriving at the dump station.
Another great free parking discovery at Mangawhai and the Museum is one of the best!
As you arrive into Hamilton off the expressway from the north, you will see at one of the roundabouts, a car on top of a pole.
This is the Jukebox Cafe and Classic Car Museum. NZMCA members can stay the night here for free and there is tons of room at the back of a huge carpark.
The Jukebox cafe is all decked out with an American 60’s Rock n roll type decor along with the staff wearing the retro clobber. While we didn’t eat here it all looks pretty good.
Click on the images for Hi res / Slideshow
The Classic Car Museum is a must do and is someone’s private collection. It includes a caravan, a Cord, and an amazing looking Auburn which I’d never heard of.
There’s a Messerschmitt along with trucks and many others. You’ll easily get lost in here for an hour or two.
We went through here with Gary and Dianne before they headed back to Taupo and were sitting in the carpark getting ready for a cuppa while waiting for Fiona. She was really taken with the Messerschmitt.
We headed over to Featherston today despite the 100k odd gale warnings and it was quite an interesting trip! Martinborough is down in a basin lower that Featherston so I suspect that protects it against the big blows but once up on the Featherston plain despite heading strait into the wind, it was evil. The Van was all over the place. Slowing down to 65k odd helped but that was all we could do when were exposed in the sides.
We looked for a park so the van wasn’t side on and found the Fell Locomotive Museum right over the road. You could barely stand up in the wind so we thought we’d run for cover into the Museum.
What an interesting place. The steep grades over the Rimutakas ranges were such that they had specially designed Shunters that used a third rail to climb and brake.
Apparently, they used to get through a set of 8 brake shoes per loco for each descent and 4 for each brake van each descent! They had a cog driven wheel in each side of the loco of the centre rail that was wound in by the engineer and driven by the steam engine. It was held in by gigantic springs for the extra traction uphill. Apparently it worked really well. Each loco could deal with 3 passenger wagons or 4 freight vans depending on the weight and it was quite common to see 4-5 Shunters per train with passenger carriages and freight in between.
We were warmly welcomed by some nice chaps who showed us and explained us how it all worked and then shown to a theatre where we saw an early 1900’s film of the whole system working. Great film. Funny to see all the old clobber that people wore back then and really interesting.
If you’re in Featherston, check it out. At $5 a head it’s well worth the visit.
We visited an unnamed disappointing coffee shop after that, that interestly had its front door facing out of the wind ! Awful coffee and very average cakes.. That’s the first we’ve struck that bad on the whole trip so can’t really complain.
Given the wind was so bad, we headed back to Martinborough for our last night. Rugby tomorrow morning. All Blacks v France. Just as well I brought the sky card with us. We’ll head to Napier after that.
3k’s or so outside of Matamata is the Firth Tower Museum.
Its an amazing collection of original buildings in the grounds of what used to be a farm for the Firth family in Auckland to feed the flour mill. It later became the base for a well known Waikato family to farm.
The original farmhouse was built with the tower in the later 1800’s but the farmhouse burnt down in 1902 and was replaced then by the current house. It was then owned by the McCaw family.
Don’t forget you can click on the images to enlarge them
In each of the buildings there is a theme of history, Agriculture, Transport, Medical, local war involvement, and there is even two carriages with the History of the Kaimai tunnel as well.
The volunteers who staff it were all wearing historical gear to add to the feel of the place. When we visited, there was school trip of local primary school kids and they all got dressed up in historical clothing to add to the occasion.
For $10 you can stay the night with power or free parking without power. One of the nice things about being on the road is discovering new places to stay and how nice they can be and often it is the least expensive that are the nicest places to stay… this was one of those times. A great way to spend the day and it really is a well setup museum.
As the posts here are a bit infrequent at the moment, if you click Follow at the bottom, you’ll be notified of a new post to save you checking in. 🙂
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