More Taranaki Adventures - TATATM

I told you I had more to share of our Christmas/New Years holidays, despite the fact its February tomorrow and our holiday seems a long time ago.

One of the days whilst we were staying at Onaero Beach was a bit drizzly, not really beach weather at all. It was suggested that due to the weather being a bit poor we could pay a visit to TATATM or the Taranaki Aviation, Transport and Technology Museum. 

TATATM is a place that I'd been past a number of times whilst growing up in Taranaki - but I had never visited. Strange as it does seem like the kind of place that you would be taken with your class at school.

The museum is very grassroots - its run by a bunch of volunteers who are obviously very passionate about history. There museum was made up of a number of different sheds which all seemed to have slightly different themes.

The first shed we visited had all kinds of old farm machinery and a whole wall of chainsaws (I didn't get a photo of that though) and an old sign from Kaimiro School which must have now closed. 

The next shed was where we encountered some of the incredibly friendly and knowledgeable volunteers that run TATATM. It was full of a whole bunch of old printing presses.

We learnt so much about printing presses - it was so fascinating! The world was so different before the advent of computers.

We stayed in this particular "shed" for a while as it had a lot of different displays - next up was some music memorabilia and marvelous machines.

Can you spot a rather young Dame Kiri Te Kanawa looking rather sultry on an album cover in the first picture.

They also had some old TVs and video player - I remember our first video player was a top loader like this and when we first got it hardly any one else had one and I thought I was pretty flash! They even had the original manual for this thing.

Next up - ALL THE TELEPHONES!!! We all got to hang out in the telephone office and check out telephones of the past.

One of the best things about a volunteer run museum which is full of donated items is that they let you play with the stuff on display. I thought that this was pretty exciting - can you tell? I'm operating the switchboard! (not really, it makes for an awesome photo though).

Oh early cellphone - you are really like a brick. Can you seriously imagine carrying this around in your bag? Perhaps this is actually a "car phone" rather than a cell phone anyway.

Rich got to pretend he was a telephone operator too - so much fun! TATATM is the best! After playing with the phones we got to go to the post office and learn about that time New Zealand changed from imperial to metric.

Next up -typewriters, computers and associated bits and pieces. How far we have come in terms of technology.

Then we got to play in different types of rescue vehicles - it was pretty sweet. Although I don't like your chances if I'm the person coming to rescue you (sorry folks).

There was also other various bits and pieces of vehicle/shed related "stuff" - not quite sure how else to explain it.

Next up was what our friend Kai had been waiting for - the "aviation" part of the museum. Kai is a hobby pilot so he was pretty keen to check out the aviation part of the museum. To be honest, the museum was pretty light on aviation stuff - but he did get to sit in a plane, so it wasn't all bad.

The final couple of "sheds" at TATATM related to the home and also shopping - whilst these two final sheds were fun, they really were in desperate need of some TLC. I think they seriously need some volunteers with an interest in these areas as it didn't seem like they were very well organised.

 I have to say that whilst there is a whole lot of cool stuff at TATATM, the thing that made our time there so awesome was the volunteers. They were a truly great bunch of people. When we first entered the museum they told us that when we finish up they would give us a souvenir "that you can't get in Wellington". They turned on one of the old machines and got it to "print" out our names - it was pretty darn cool.

That was our fun time at TATATM - I would go back again for sure and if you're ever in Taranaki you should go too.