We woke to heavy grey skies and a deep bank of dark grey cloud over the Tasman sea, a good day to be moving on! So easy to pack up a motorhome, not! The number of times forget to lock a drawer or cupboard, forget to put the table leg on the bed so it doesn't roll around....we'll get there in the end!

Stopped off in Takaka to buy some mossie bite cream (when did they get us?) and some more food rations and a coffee to go. We drove back to Motueka - surely this is one of the most beautiful routes in the world? High undulating passes with a deep rolling valley floor of different vegetation, colour and usage. Breathtaking for sure! Cutting in from Motueka along the Old Highway 61 aka Swamp Road (!) we picked up HW 6 to drop us down North of Greymouth, on to the Reefton Historic HW 69 (?why so-named) and then diverted off to our campsite for the next two days - Jackson's Retreat. (We highly recommend it, great location, great facilities, but we suspect great mossies too.)

We started out driving through the now familiar fruit farms and wineries, past huge acres of Hops (the Nelson area is the only area for growing Hops in NZ), forever it seemed driving past the Kahurangi National Park), through high passes, valley floors, deep gorges (Buller Gorge)and flat farmland. Drove past an organic farm where the farmer was using a hand rototiller in his field, passed many lorries - logs and fuel and a quaintly named Dusty Diggers lorry.

The scenery was fantastic, at times reminded us of Canada, and at times we wondered if we had strayed into the USA as we drove over creeks and creeks...and creeks - Boulder, Johnnie Walker, Granity, Sandy, Coal, Washout, Two Mile, Four Mile, Eight Mile(!), Claybank, Crooked, Doctor's, Doughboy, Flaxbush, Frying Pan, Dead Dog (hmm, one after the other), Big Deep, Little Deep and the interestingly named DellaVeDora!

We passed a carpenter's workshop - Richard Nicholls, passed Someone's Treasure (2nd hand shop), drove over Ben's Bridge, through Inangahua (scene of a big earthquake with land slips in 1968) and at last passed many other camper vans (Apollo - YAY!) including a 'Spaceship - the Swiss Army Knife of Camper vans' to our glorious destination - Jackson's Retreat in Jacksons. Tomorrow it's Arthur's Pass!

Footnote: Sorry for the tedious list's and anecdotes, you'd be surprised what amuses on long journey's!