Frosty First Day of Kiwi Spring
Departing Napier on a cold, blustery, rainy day, we decided to while away a couple hours touring the Hastings wineries. One tasting led to another and before we knew it our credit card was a few dollars lighter and we were loading our bottles of wine into a safe place in the campervan. Interestingly we found we had a connection with the Sileni winery. When we were at Lucy’s wedding in July, Tom met a young New Zealander, also called Tom, whose family owned the land which is now the winery. The manager knew Kiwi Tom and his family and whether that led to us getting excellent serviceand a free tasting or not we’ll never know.
Our next stop was Dannevirke (Danish for Danish Creation). A visit to the I-site confirmed what we suspected, there wasn’t a lot on offer in Dannevirke. According to our grumpy, Kiwi, anti-All Black campsite owner there was not even a pub to watch the Italy v Russia rugby match.
In the supermarket we wanted to know the difference between hogget and lamb. Fortunately for us the lady standing next to us was the daughter of a sheep farmer and told us that her father would never eat lamb if there was hogget to be had. We decided to give it a try. For those of you not in the know, hogget is the lamb that is in its second spring, the next step between lamb and mutton. Fortified with food and wine we found a beautiful site set in a nature reserve, well a few caged deer and aviary, and hunkered down to try our hogget and sample one of our new wines. (For those who want to know we couldn’t tell the difference between hogget and lamb.) We woke up to the first day of New Zealand spring with a crisp frost on the ground and the heater struggling to warm us up. We later found out it had been 0 degrees. It was however a beautiful, sunny morning and we packed up and headed out to Martinborough, our last stop on our way back to Wellington.
After parking the campervan in a trailer park on the edge of the quiet little village of Martinborough, we took the 10 minute walk into the center of town to try the free wine tasting, buy supper (lamb – the butcher had no hogget) and potatoes, and check out pubs where we can watch tonight’s match – Japan vs Tonga.
