Hello again, thanks for all your messages, it's lovely to hear from you! Backtracking a little here, as we've had no Internet for a couple of days. We set off on Saturday for the long drive to Wellington, up and down more mountains, round more hairpin bends, and through more stretches of roadworks where the roads are being re-surfaced with gravel (lucky we took out the extra insurance that covers windscreens!) There was more evidence of the overnight storms as we headed south, think we were lucky that the worst of it missed our campsite. Lashing rain and high winds for most of the journey, so we had to take it easy, but eventually reached Lower Hutt, Wellington, where we had arranged to stay the night with an old friend, from midwifery training days, Lesley Hooson, who I haven't seen for about 11 years. Unfortunately, when we arrived, she was very unwell, having been struck down by a nasty bout of food poisoning about 48 hours earlier! We had a brief catch up, but then she had to head off to bed, still feeling really ill. Still, we had a very nice evening with Lesley's partner Paul, who we'd not met before, and their dog Pippa, a real bed for the night and a wonderful powerful shower - lovely!

The next morning, Sunday, her partner took her to A&E, as she was no better, and we had to set off early for our ferry, which was leaving ahead of the planned departure time due to the bad weather! When we got on board we decided to get a cabin, as we had heard so many people say that the Cook Strait is the roughest stretch of water in the world, just in case we got seasick for the first time ever! However, our fears were unfounded, and compared to all our crossings over the Irish sea, we didn't find it too rough at all! Once we got into the Marlborough sounds, it was more like a river than the sea - very smooth! We had planned to head for Kaikoura, and the whale watching boat trips, but as the rough weather was forecast to continue for the next couple of days, we decided to head off in the opposite direction, towards Nelson, which is meant to have the most hours of sunshine in the whole of New Zealand..........