Brains, you go on ahead, I'll catch up!

Okay, let me just start off by saying my poor little Scott brain no longer works at all, its travelled too far from its safe little warren, its see glorious scene after glorious scene, and every where we go has been different from the last place.
Ruth will attest that I cant seem to ever remember the day that’s JUST passed, so this post about the last few days will no doubt be vague and hazy.

Right, yesterday… Kaikoura!
What do I recall, well, I can remember lying in our tent and hearing the waves slapping on the pebbley beach, and thinking, wow, I’ve really missed that sound, (we will ignore the fact that at some point in the night I was also sung to gently by the sound of a passing freight train… that’s not as romantic really is it!)

I also recall that we went hunting for our new favourite past time, MINIGOLF!
Sadly, what we found was not pretty.
To be fair the first mini golf we played may have been more impressive if we had not grown plump on the sweet joy of elaborate courses the country over.
But yeah… 9 holes, and needed a little love.

Then we found this… my heart broke a little to find a minigolf course hidden away, closed and obscured… we fled, thinking we heard duelling banjos in the distance.

Oh and then we saw a car crash!
Well, what we actually saw was a stupid person zoom in and park right behind a backing truck… CRUNCH!
No one was harmed but the young girl was very vocal about the sate of her car… oh well.
(fun fact! She almost featured in one of our lists, we were looking for people dressed the same and she was in a subway uniform like some one else near by… but we thought we would just mock her pain instead.)

The last thing I recall about yesterday was crawling into our tent in Blenhiem after eating WAY too much Indian food, (AGAIN) and dying a happy death by an idyllic river.
(Random fact! The place we ate was called maharajas, and one of the dishes we had was called beef maharaja, it was delicious and coconuty, and I have no idea what to ask for when I want this at any other Indian restaurant, so that will be on my list of things I’ll miss about the south island… sad but true.)

a river, a bridge, and sheep and ducks (2 kinds) (wildlife not shown, off being wild)

NEW DAY!
It’s, um, Friday?

Well in truth it’s now Saturday, but that’s recent, so… blah.

Our last day in the south, wow, what a trip, but we’ll sum that all up in a post to come, with reflections and discussions… and such.

Right so, Friday.
We got up, packed up, said good by to the “night ducks” (swell little guys, ask me about em some time,) and decided to kill the day in Blenhiem, (Lee said Picton was only 20 minutes away.

So, while in town, we decided to knock of all the list we could, counting the one I forgot to tell you we did yesterday, we ended up knocking off three!
We are surely the RULERS of made up games that we write the rules to!
Behold, list thingies!

A list!

Some where you can just fit!

Someone you know!

Really old building (1903)

Monkey!

McDonalds!

Something Green!

B list

Something orange

An Elevator

A Kiddie Ride

A funny Tee Shirt

A busker (truth be told he just turned out to be a crazy person)

A place with the same address as us!

List C

A farmers

Cat (turns out I had one on my back)

Things dressed the same (cheaters!)

We also have pictures of:
something purple
escalator
Somewhere above street level
...but i'm having some upload issues

After all that jazz we visited a local internet place and printed out our bookings for the place we will be staying in Welly… One dollar got all that done, SWISH!

Hmmm what else did we do.
Well we went to a neat café called the living room…. And over stayed our welcome after a few hours (R. reading her book and me making many notes on games in development and scratching the last of the scratchies we had chained across the country!)
After that we used up some McDs vouchers… and over stayed our welcome.

Finally we realised it may be time to make our move towards the end of the south island and R, S and Lee tottered back to Picton.

Once there we cashed in the last of our scratches to buy a few more for our ferry ride.
We then partook of one last, (very cool,) game of mini golf and then boarded our ferry.

Hmm… looking back over this post, I’m a little disappointed that its not a more exciting for our last day, but, well, after 2 and a bit weeks, my heart is truly longing to get back to MY island, so all my enthusiasm lies there.

Strange things to see on a ferry

And after 3 hours of swaying ferry travel, (complete with games of gin rummy to win the right to scratch the last instant kiwis,) I was at last (in a way) home again… and BOY, did our home island open its arms to us!

Ruth had studiously booked a “wotif” super deal on the internet for our last night.,, at the Intercontinental.

I’d hoped to add a shot of spice to the end of this spice detailing the wonder of our suite, (cost to us $119, down from $430!) but there are no words beyond SUMPTOUS COMFORT.

Oh… and MINI BAR!

Anyway, we are nearly home again, and can’t wait to see you all!

PEACE!

P.S. we owed you a real Parking meter...