Feb 9th - Tongariro to Wellington.

Today we woke up early, packed up our stuff and loaded up the rental car, a Nissan Wingroad, which we have called everything from the Rim runner to bowl streaker. We headed down to Wellington. It was billed as a 4 hour drive, and turns out the GPS was dead on target this time. We call it Judith because that's what one of Katie's friends calls her GPS, as it speaks in a female voice with a Brittish accent. That's not to say we trusted Judith completely, we did check the entire route she recommended before heading out.


Where's Waldo? (find the sheep)


The drive was pretty easy, by NZ standards. None of the driving is ever as easy as driving on interstates in the US, since all of the major roads anywhere outside a handful of major cities are two lanes at best. NZ is very fond of one lane bridges, where one direction has to yield to the other direction before they cross. There is a sign indicating whether or not you have the right of way a little bit before each bridge. It keeps you on your toes. Every once and a while, there is a passing lane, but the general rule is two lanes. This makes the driving demand alot more attention, and as such is much more stressful than cruising along an interstate for hours at a time.

We stopped for brunch at Wanganui, a small town that sits just inland where the Whanganui river flows into the Tasman Sea. They had a very nice main street and we sat outside at a little bistro and had an incredible meal. We then continued on to Wellington, which was about 2 hours from there. It took us a while to figure out where our hotel was as Judith was a little bit off on her location of it, and it was on a one way street. This made for many, many U-Turns in pretty heavy weekend traffic on tight city streets. We finally found the hotel and the "carpark" (Kiwi for parking lot). Getting to the carpark required driving up a very narrow 150 foot long alley inclined about 30 degrees (about the same pitch as a normal roof), and with only about 6-8 inches on either side. The carpark only had 1 space available, and we took it. Needless to say, we were very content to leave the car where we parked it for the evening.




After checking in we walked around the city, we ate fish and chips at a brewery by the harbor, and played around on a playground by the waterfront. Then we got some more groceries, ate gellato (raspberry/chocolate, and Chocolate Hazlenut for Katie), and went back to the hotel.