We slept in a bit because it was raining and I don't think any of us wanted to get up for a day of bad weather. We did so eventually and actually ran into the couple we had met yesterday at breakfast, the ones that had the little debacle with the Argentinians. We chatted with the wife, who was super nice and friendly. After, we headed for The Warehouse, which is just a big store, and one of my favorites for getting just about anything you need. We finally purchased a big tent so we can all sleep together instead of separately in two tents! We bought other kitchen supplies we needed too.
After, we headed for our first winery which was a little south and out of town. I was excited to go to this one because I missed it the first time I was in Napier. It's the oldest one in New Zealand and it's called Mission Estate Winery. It had a gorgeous driveway through a vineyard and up to the buildings. We went into the main building and purchased a wine tasting and was gifted three complimentary wine glasses. We tried six or seven different wines and they were all amazingly good but we liked the Reisling, Pinot Gris, and the Rose the best. Michealla bought a bottle of the Rose. The person giving us the tasting was new so she wasn't able to tell us too much about the winery. We finished up and went out on the patio that overlooked the vineyard. It was such a pretty setting with the old vintage white estate with fountains and the perfect wine trees below.
We then went basically next door to the Church Road winery, which was also beautiful but not as old and neat as the first. The inside of the cellar door/restaurant area was really pretty but darkly lit. I was feeling the wine a bit just from going to one place already. We quickly went through the tasting as we chatted with the lady and ate crackers out of the jar. Once we were done at this winery I was doin' pretty good. It took us awhile to find the third winery, the Moana Park winery. It was smaller, a family run place with a great, low-key atmosphere. We sat outside at a big picnic table with an older, soft spoken gentleman. He told us a lot about each wine and was very informative. I liked a lot of the white wines and Cassela liked the Merlot Malbec so I got it for her for her upcoming birthday. We stayed there for a bit just enjoying it and we had a really great time.
After all that wine, we were ready for some food. We found a tavern that the guy recommended and we ordered burgers. It took quite some time for the food to come and we were definitely hungry by then. We drove back into Napier afterwards and went to Countdown for groceries. Back at the park, we made tacos for Taco Tuesday with all the fixings, they came out delicious. The majority of our meals turn out amazing that sometimes we surprise ourselves. We each bring good food ideas to the table (pun intended) and we come up with some really tasty dishes.
After, we put up our new tent, Cassela and I organized the car, we washed our clothes, and ironed some. We saw a big inflatable, floating, play "thing" in one of the inlets near the road before and thought we'd go check it out. The water was quite cold and the sun hadn't had a big effect on us during the day so we decided not to join the kids on it. There was a trampoline section, a rope climbing part, a slide, and a high part that you could jump off of. We sat in the sun and watched big jellyfish float by the shore before heading back to camp.
