salamanca! not, as I used to think, a type of lizard…our sand­wich part­ner would, give or take a few miles, be Sala­manca, Spain. We’re not sure if this is the rationale behind the nam­ing of the Kel­burn road that shares the name (a quick Google reveals that Lord Wel­ling­ton fought a fam­ous battle there – in Spain, that is, not up Kel­burn way – in 1812, so most likely), but, either way, it’s nice to think that we share a tenu­ous geo­graph­ic tie with a North Span­ish town that looks like it has some pretty nice archi­tec­ture, a pop­u­la­tion of around 180000 (about double that in the wider region), and a decent cli­mate. Just like home, eh?

Weirdly enough, the ‘if the earth were a sand­wich’ tool also reveals that the closest New Zea­l­and has to a ‘South of France’ is the Chath­am Islands. Who’d have thought?