23/03/09

I woke up at 6 freezing my arse off wondering why it was so cold. I kept looking up at the hatch above me and wondering whether or not it was open, I was sure it must have been shut but it was too dark to tell and I definately wasn't getting out of bed to check. At 7 the alarm went off, the hatch was open, so I got up shut it and drove in to town while the others stayed in bed. The temperature outside was 5.5, it was 6 by the time we arrived in town. I was first on the phone to Mum for mothers day and the 37 minutes I got seemed like only 10. My feet were freezing when I got back so I put on trousers, socks and trainers and waited for the others to phone. Pat and Rich were done in what seemed like seconds. We could see our breath in the camper so Helen decided to make cups of tea.

We left for Wellington at about 9. The main road turned in to a windy mountain climb again which slowed us down as we ended up driving in to clouds again. We arrived in Wellington at 12 and parked up at the nearest car park we could find to the tourist info site. We were all pretty hungry so after booking some ferry tickets we went to the food court on the main street were we all got sandwiches, except for Rich who stuck to his kebab. We wandered down the street checking out the shops, I went and paid the speeding fine in the Westpack then bought a new phone card, then went and snuck off for another sandwich, Pat caught me in the act, as he had snuck off and bought a chocolate slice. We headed back to the camper and waited for the others.

We decided to go bowling as there was a bogof token in the guide book. We spent ages deciding where to park and ended up parking back in the same place then walking to it. Helen wrote our names down on a piece of paper and the woman typed them up on the screen, we had Laura, Helen, Patrick, Luice and Richard, what a tard. I was awful for the first game, Pat was good, he finished with 96 and scored the only strike. There was a battle between Helen and I which I ended up losing miserably, I finished with a score of 63, all the others were in the 80's. The second game was a little better for me. Coops started off very consistent, getting 8's and 9's until the last few goes. Helen and Pat were pretty awful, Burns was mediocre.

The others went to New World to pick up food for the night while I went to bring the van over to the shop. I got some really funny looks when I tried to leave it parked half way up a curb and over a pavement so I thought I'd better shift it. The woman in the info site had told us of showers and a decent place to park for free for the night down Ocean Parade. We drove down the road but saw the parking site before we had seen the showers so knew we had gone to far. It was 5pm and rush hour in the city and there was no place to turn around, after a while of driving I had to just spin it round in the middle of the road when I saw a gap in the traffic. Just my luck the next car that came around the corner was a bloody cop car, I got stuck over his side of the road while a stream of traffic kept pouring out down the lane I needed to pull in to. The cop was giving me such an evil eye. After another 20 minutes of strange manouvers in and around the city we managed to find the showers, everyone hopped out and I was left to find a parking space for the b****** while they showered. Luckily a spot had opened up about a K down the road so I took it and dashed for the showers. The showers were inside a fitness complex, apparently we were supposed to pay, but I just walked straight through. It was one of those changing room where you get lots of naked old men, it wasn't the nicest sight in the world but it was a free warm shower so I made the most of it.

On the way back to the night time parking area we passed a sign for a lookout so we decided to turn around and check it out. I've never done so much manouvering in my life. The lookout was right at the top of a mountain and the roads on the way up were so windy that every turn in the road had to be completed with a 3pt turn. There was a guy in a black car stuck behind us wetting himself with laughter at the site of us attempting to get up there. We finally made it, got our photos and headed back down. We played a bit of cards in the evening had roast chicken with mash veg and gravy and then chilled out before going to sleep.

24/03/09

We woke up at about 7 again and lounged around in bed reading, Coops found something funny and ended up spitting milk all over my bed sheets. We We drove to the museum car park at about 10, and asked the guy how much it would cost to park. He told us it would be $10 if we left before midnight and $16 after, so we handed him a $20 and told him we'd be gone before midnight and he only gave us $4 change. Turns out he was talking complete crap and it's $10 up to 6pm, dick!

We went around the first floor of the museum checking out all the amazing facts about volcanoes and tsunamis, then looked at the huge squid they had caught and preserved. We got a little bored after about an hour so went for a wander in to town to break the day up a little bit. I told Helen about the new phone card I had bought so she got one as well, while she was getting hers the woman noticed that they were all expired, mine was also expired, luckily the girl that served me yesterday was working again so they sorted me out with a new one.

We went across the road to get on the Cable-Car to the top of the botanical gardens. There was a woman sitting down opposite Rich who had the darkest most distict moustache and goatee I have ever seen. On the way down through the gardens we spotted a kids playground with a zip-line. It just had to be done, but there were little kids hogging it, so the girls and I amused ourselves on this 4 way swing until it became free. Before we left the playground Helen decided she couldn't leave without having a go on the slide, so she went down the one the kids weren't using. They weren't using it for a reason, as she got to the bottom she slid right in to a massive puddle, completely soaking her arse and the back of her legs. We continued on to the bottom of the gardens and followed the road back round to Lambert Quay.

We then went to Cuba Street which was supposed to have really interesting shops, I failed to see any interesting shops. Although I did see some weird sculpture that had loads of buckets arranged one above the other, the top one was slowly being filled with water and would eventually tip, sloshing some water into the ones beneath it. I stood there and watched until the bottom one tipped and soaked some passers by. Rich and I went to the post office and then used the toilets in the library, where we found Pat using the laptop. I told Burns to meet me back at Pat when we had finished in the bog, he didn't, so I just went back to the van.

The girls and I went back to the museum to check out the final floors. We were being pretty childish and fiddling around with just about ever piece of equipment we could find. We all went to the library to use the internet for the remainder of the afternoon and then one by one went back to the van. We spent the night in the carpark , the girls cooked spag bol but we had to keep running the engine because the auxilliary battery kept running out and leaving us in the dark. The spag bol was awesome, Helen even ate heaps of mushrooms without a single complaint. I decided not to sleep as we would be moving on to the ferry soon so Coops and I watched Spiderman, I started nodding off towards the end of it and fell asleep at midnight. I was woken up at quater past to navigate Rich to the ferry crossing. We stopped off to fill up on the way and I got a bit of staring while filling up a campervan with diesel in my pj's in the middle of the night.

When we got to the ferry crossing a guy had the cheek to ask if we could smuggle him aboard, I think Rich was actually going to do it because he had to ask us, I said not a chance mate, just drive off, so he did. I spent the 3 hour ferry crossing reading while the others managed to get some micro-sleep on these weird swivelly chairs. We arrived in Picton and got our bearings then headed off along the scenic route and parked up in a layby on the edge of a cliff at about half 6 to get a bit of sleep.