We left lovely Picton on a sunny morning and enjoyed the ferry cruise through the Marlborough Sound, although there were no sitings of dolphins or whales. We thought as we were going north it should be getting warmer but we arrived in a cloudy and very windy Wellington. Wellington is known as the Windy City so it kept up its reputation. We did a quick visit to the famous Te Papa Museum as it is the place to visit. Although there were some good exhibitions the huge building was not as impressive as I had hoped. Far too much "arty" stuff for Graham but the interactive earthquake was much more fun. We drove around the scenic drive and parked on the harbour side for free. You couldn't imagine parking in our capital city for free.
There is a famous cable car takes you to the Botanical Gardens and observatory. As we hadn't visited any gardens for at least a week it seemed like a good idea. However the bottom of the cable car is in the middle of a major shopping precinct (yawn) and there was no convenient car parking, obviously that wasn't a consideration when they built the cable car in 1900, so we parked at the top of Wellington and walked through the gardens to the cable car. We hadn't realised that Wellington was so hilly and the gardens provide a spectacular view over the city. We had to have quick ride down to the city centre shops and back up the hill to our camper van. So in a short time we saw quite a lot of Wellington.
We headed out of town in a lot of heavy traffic and we had to remind ourselves that this was the capital and it was rush hour, but we were not used to traffic.
We are staying in a place 30 minutes drive out of Wellington called Upper Hutt. It has a good network of tracks along the river which might make for a good morning run.