Long lost relatives...
We've just spent the last week or so catching up with my long lost distant cousins and I feel i'm making a start at catching Eoin up where family size is concerned now. As fate would have it, my grandmother Eva's cousin Sue adn her husband Jack happen to own a holiday park in the middle of the Hawkes Bay wine region. We turned up to say hello and find out about the family and were greeted with such wonderful hospitality that it took us three days to leave.
Since then we've called in to catch up with Nelly (also Eva's cousin) who we exchahged past and present family stories with; Helen (Sue's daughter) and husband Kerry and Alison (also Eva's cousin) who was helping out her daughter Sarah who will be imminently having her third child...busy, busy. And what a lovely, welcoming family.
Hawkes Bay
We couldn't possibly spend three day in Hawkes Bay without sampling some of the local wine, there are vineyards everywhere. SO we pitched up at various wineries who let us taste lots of their wine and couldn't help but buy a few bottles (see photos). Yum.
We did some more walking - on one walk up the Te Mata peak my vertigo got the better of me and much to Eoin's amusement I was reduced to walking up the extremely steep hill on all fours like a sheep (well, they seemed to be doing well like that), we did another (slightly tipsier but fortunately less hilly) wak around lots of nearby vineyards.
Camping
We're still fully into the camping despite one or two small problems.
We braved the rain for a day - taking the tent down in the rain in Taupo and putting it back up again in a break in the rain in Havelock North (it went on all day). I felt quite hard-core, like a real camper. Luckily that is the only rain we've experienced so far, i'm not sure how far i want to go with this "real camper" malarky.
The second problem was slightly more self-induced. It seems that headbutting your tent on the way in doesn't do the thing any good at all as I discovered to our detriment a couple of mornings ago.The load cracking sound I heard was in fact not one but two of our super-duper, hi-tec, hard-wearing, flexible fibre-glass poles snapping. The guys in the camping shops don't know how I managed to do so much damage.
We managed to spent one night with duct tape holding everything together but the whole thing collapsed when we tried to put it up in Wellington. So now we've ordered our replacement poles from America (they dont hold spare parts in this continent) and in the interim some very competent, outdoors type men have fixed our poles up with some other parts. We haven't put the thing back up yet though so keep your fingers crossed for us.
Wellington
So now we're in Wellington awaiting our ferry journey to the South Island. Our sighseeing here so far has consisted of a tour of every camping and outdoors shop in the city but we're hoping to squeeze in the museum and a little ride up the cable car before we go.
