We crossed the waters!

It dawns on me that every time I start one of these posts I’m talking about how it’s the start of something.
Well here I go again.
While yesterday was the beginning of our adventure-proper, today was mighty big step, first day hitting out big southern island… Magic!

But once again I’m telling this tale all out of order, I best talk about what happened last night.

So there we were fast asleep, replete on room service pizza and finely temperature controlled, when out of the blue, at around 3am, off goes a mighty loud alarm.
We stumbled around in the dark, trying to decipher the mumbled pre-recorded voice that came between the klaxon blasts, and finally figured out that it was saying something about “evacuate,” “building” “not a drill” and “fire.”
It wasn’t for some time stumbling and crashing about that we realised it was coming from the building across way, and that a gaggle of firemen were attending the flashing panel on the side of it.
We returned to our nest and waited out, whatever it was, and then Ruthy drifted back to sleep and I lay there for a bit thinking about the day to come.

And then, it was here in a flash, with minimal fuss we were parked on the interislander and chugging along

.

I must say the digs are fantastic. Cafes, bars, lounges… its a little floating town!
We chose to wait out the madness of the full capacity trip sitting in a café section nibbling, (yet more,) pizza and playing my new favourite game… gin rummy*

When sounds came in to view we chanced the crowds to drink in our first glimpse of our destination, and then we tottered down to the car once more and awaited to let free into the light and on our merry way in Picton

Picton was…

...brief

We wandered round what felt like the whole place and took in an ice block.
Shrugging a happy sun drenched shrug, we piled into our trusty auto once more and set off for Nelson.

By Jove, there are A-LOT of twists and turns between those locations! We had to take a small break too choke down the greenness in our gills!
After that we were back travelling in strange places with stranger speed limits… I’d never seen a 90 speed sign before.

Nelson opened up before us with its beautiful ocean spreading out as far as the eye could see! And after a few misses, out little GPS and Accommodation book eventually found us a gem of a motel to get set up in.

We plonked out stuff down and set out for a gentle plod around this lovely city, winding through the beach and having a splash in the gentle lapping surf.
THIS is what holidays are all about.

Now I should mention that we are doing this journey in a magical way.
Most days, we have to break open one specially prepared envelope.
In it we have the day’s budget in dosh, some fuel vouchers, a note on who will be driving today, (Ruth today,) and finally, most importantly, there is a list.

The list gives us a series of tasks we have to tick off in the location we find our selves in today.

On the agenda to day, we needed to find our selves:

a lion

A blue thing

A person with no hair

The oldest car in the area

A funny street sign

And something cold (the freezer in our unit)

Speaking of which, here is our tidy little unit after we detidied it a bit with our travelling mess.

Yeah and that’s that, we are now watching lotto and planing our trip to Greymouth tomorrow!
Big day, great fun… and my impersonation of M*A*S*H 4077

See y’all tomorrow!

*Weird as it may seem for a guy who has over 150 board games, I do really like gin rummy, it’s a perfect little game, enough luck and strategy to make it fun and possible to get better at, all games should aspire to this level of refinement.