I was glad I brought my blanket in with me on the ferry, as the spot I had chosen to sleep on, unbeknownst to me when I first chose it, was in the direct line of path of a very strong fan, which made it a little cold.
But the blanket was perfect, and though I didn’t sleep very well, I did get a little bit of sleep.
We arrived in the North Island somewhere around 5:00 or 5:30 I think. Both of us were dead tired, so we made our first priority finding somewhere to take a good come along nap. We ended up finding a place by the marina and slept for a couple hours or so.
One of the times that I woke up, I noticed that the caretaker of the marina was parked next to us, so being slightly concerned that they weren’t going to be happy with us parked there, I got out of the car and started chatting with the woman in the car next to us. She was a cutie who was traveling around a bit with her husband, and I ended up talking to both of them for quite a while about the places they loved in the South Island.
After Chase got up, we cleaned out the car a bit and got organized a bit. Then we head out for the day. We decided to take the North route to Nelson, stopping at a little swimming hole along the way to do a little bit of short cliff jumping.
It was cloudy and a little rainy, so it wasn’t as warm as it otherwise could have been. The water was great, but on a cloudy rainy day, we still got a tad bit cold after a while.
After that, we started heading toward Nelson again only to find out that the road to Nelson had been so damaged by flooding, and I’m assuming resultant slips (landslides), as we’ve seen those absolutely everywhere, that it was closed, turning 1 hour drive into like a 3 and 1/2 hour drive having to go all the way back around nearly to where we came from and then back around the southern route.
We missed the reopening of the road by about 28 hours, as it was scheduled to be reopened to the next day at 10:00 p.m.
🙃
But as per usual, we just rolled with it, and decided to swing back around. On the way around, we stopped at the grocery store and at the department store picking up a handful of things. A blanket for Chase, some shin length socks for me with all the sand flies that love to attack my ankles, and a few other things.
We then drove toward a relatively famous cave, the deepest in all of new zealand, stopping to sleep on a pull out on the side of the road somewhere around 10:00, I think.
It was mostly just a catch up on sleep and run errands day with a little bit of swimming mixed in.
There were bugs all over when we bed down for the night, so Chase set up the mosquito netting on one of the windows so that we could have the window open for fresh air, and we went to bed.
Love and hugs to all! 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 