Nelson, tents and beach

15/11/12
Absolutely hot day and consequently quite exhausting in the car.  We said goodbye to the noisy trucks and cars going over the bridge and have had them replaced here in Nelson by an aeroplane leaving the airport every half hour or so.  Surprisingly it's not as noisy as it was in Blenheim.

Picton: Sounds and boats.  Difficult to capture the
beauty of this harbour on film. 

The trip to Picton was fine and easy and took less than half an hour.  We wandered around for a while checking it out, enjoying the water and the boats - the Interislander in her berth - and the sunshine.  Found a secondhand shop that also sold antiques and it had a huge range of stuff from all sorts of vintages.  Bought a potato masher for a dollar, since we discovered last night that along with the lack of potatoes we didn't have a masher either.  Tempted by some other things, including the bus outside the building that was offered as a trade-in - it was fitted out as a campervan - but managed to control ourselves.  Also found a secondhand bookshop, a very good done, and finished up buying an Ian Rankin that I don't think I've read: Exit Music.  I think it was supposed to be the last Rebus book, but the most recent book by Rankin brings Rebus out of retirement, and also includes the characters from the two Complaints books, who, curiously, come across as different characters in this new book - it's like they're seen as different because we're seeing them through Rebus' eyes.  Consequently we get very little insight into Malcolm Fox in this new book.  I had a bit of a discussion with the proprietor of the bookshop about the way paper books are being taken over by electronic versions; naturally he wasn't very impressed by the latter and thought a monopoly would eventuate and cut lots of people out.  However I think it's a transition time, like it or not, and we'll have to live with it somehow. Books as such don't seem to be going out of fashion as yet.  There was a good secondhand bookshop n Blenheim as well as a very good new books bookshop, staffed by at least five people.

We checked at the info place about just how hilly and winding the Queen Charlotte road was and, on the basis of what they said, decided it was too hilly.  Just as well, as the road from Havelock to Nelson was not at all pleasant to drive on.  Up to Havelock it was fine, running along through a lovely valley (the Rai Valley, I think?) but a few miles after Havelock it climbed up into the mountains.  That wasn't too much of a problem - it was the endless trip downhill again that nearly drove us crazy with its constant twists and turns, and with trying to keep the car from going too fast.  With all the weight on board I don't much trust the brakes to hold us if we have a problem.  When we were coming back from Christchurch after our last trip there, and Celia was driving, the car was doing an awful shuddering thing as we came down the Kilmog, which made Celia very nervous (not to mention me!)

We stopped off in Havelock for lunch near the water, and were joined by a very fluffy cat who just sat beside us without demanding anything, in spite of the fact that we were eating sardines (not on toast, but on pita bread - we'd run out of ordinary bread).

Tahuna Beach, Tahunanui.  You can just see some of the
dozen or so surf kites people were practicing with.

Anyway after our long trip down the neverending hill, we got to Nelson - and began to breath normally again.  We'd decided to stay at the Tahuna Beach motor camp, which turns out to be 54 acres of campervans, tents, cabins, motels and whatever, all within spitting distance of the sea.  It's a good place but when we tried to get the tent up, the wind just wouldn't let us.  We decided to try a different tent site since we were told it didn't matter which site we used but while that was a little less windy, we still had enormous trouble getting the tent to sit properly. The front kept blowing inwards and in general not looking right.  The rest was okay, but the area round the door bent inwards.  Turned out that one of the rods had split badly, so it's not surprising that it wouldn't take the strain.  Celia had already repaired another one on site and we'd got that in place - she'd repaired several split ones before left home - bit in the end the tent was just plain wonky and was going to get wonkier.  We capitulated and hired a cabin instead, which meant taking the tent down again.  At least that was a much quicker job than the two attempts we'd made to get it up!   The cabin is a standard one but in fact is better than the so-called de luxe one we had in Kaikoura.  It doesn't have a sink, which was an advantage at the other place, but it has a fridge and a telly.  It would sleep four if necessary, so we have a choice of beds.

Celia's happy to start heading home after we've been here for a couple of nights.  She's over tenting for the time being, and in fact, given the relative price of the cabins, it's not worth all the hefting and heaving and shoving and back-breaking that the tent takes to get up, just to save a few dollars.  She'd had plans about going into more remote camp sites, like the DOC ones, but that idea went west after we'd been at Waitaki Waters, and had spent some time at Marfells Beach.  I think she's realised that we're getting a bit past all the hassles of camping, although she enjoys cooking on her gas stove - making pikelets on it near Glentunnel and cooking eggs on the side of the road near Makikihi were both highlights.

Now we have to figure out how to get home without too many mountain roads like the one we went on today.  Looks like we can avoid going back to Blenheim, by going down through the middle of the island but I think that road is a winding as well.  Anyway, we'll see how it goes.  We can stop between here and Christchurch and again between Christchurch and Dunedin if we want.   That'll take us through the weekend and into next  week and that'll be enough.   We'll probably stop overnight with my daughter and her family on the way back as well.

Blenheim and ducklings

14/11/12
We got into Blenheim about four and booked into the Top Ten park, which by the time night fell was fairly full with campervans. Not so many tents - in fact, ours is just about the only one, it think - but it's a very tidy, and large, site.  Only disadvantage is that the bridge on which all the main road traffic travels is over the stream that runs through the caravan park and the traffic noise echoes and reverberates around the place.  When the trains go past, and there seem to be plenty of them, the noise is fortissimo!  In spite of that we both slept pretty well, so that's a plus.  I'm over in the kitchen typing this because Celia is still asleep.  I was awake at four, prayed for a while, and went back to sleep at five I guess, woke again at six, and have been over here pretty much since then.

We did a bit of a tour around Blenheim on foot last night, getting some idea of the place.  Quite a different town to what I expected, though it was very deserted last night.  We'll check it out further today.  The weather has got past its wet and heavy cloud stuff, so it looks as though it's going to be a decent day, always a relief when camping!

Feeding the ducklings, while the
mother duck looks on unconcerned.

Last night we cooked and had our tea outside rather than dragging everything over to the kitchen - the kitchen is up a little rise and then up some stairs (for some reason the facilities near us are in a building where everything is upstairs and nothing on ground level).  While we were eating, a mother duck and her six ducklings - we'd seen them down by the stream before - came over to see if there was anything going food-wise.  I went and got some bread, and while the mother looked on, her six ducklings scrabbled for bits of bread right out of my hand,  I've just passed them again coming back from the kitchen. They show absolutely no fear.

Later. We had a very quiet day all up, spending the morning mostly either reading, snoozing, or doing the puzzles we got from 1066.  I managed to complete three of these including one I hadn't been able to do the other day, but this afternoon I couldn't get my head round them at all.  Maybe I'd worn my brain out.  I finished the latest Ian Rankin tonight; very good read with a nice red herring running through the greater part of it.  I’m not sure that the solution to the serial murders is handled as much of a surprise: the killer is a character who doesn't turn until late in the book, and there's only Rebus's hunch to undo him.

This afternoon we drove into the town centre and wandered around doing our own thing separately: Celia at the op shops, me taking some photos and visiting the Millennium Gallery, which had a couple of exhibitions on (with paintings all for sale) but had no room for any of its permanent collection.  An ongoing problem apparently.

We were going to have potatoes for tea (along with some other things) but the potatoes had vanished out of the car.   Must have left them at my daughter's.  Tomorrow we're aiming to go to Picton and then round the coast road to Havelock and so to Nelson.  We're told that the coast road round the Queen Charlotte Sound is good and not too hilly.  Let's hope that's right!

Kaikoura, rain and more

12/11/12

At present sitting in a rest spot about 18 km south of Cheviot.  Celia's reading her Kindle and I've just been for a bit of a walk, first in a small plantation off the side of the road and then down by the river -  the Greta - which is flowing past at great speed, and is quite extensive in breadth.  There's a large chicken [it was probably a cockerel] wandering around in the rest area by the fence; it doesn't seem to have any connection with the place and yet seems quite at home.

Celia and I left the house yesterday morning about ten am with rough plans to find a church and go to a service before we went to the lunch for Heather at 12.30, but we didn't find a church and in the end sat in the Northlands mall and did another of those puzzles we got in Geraldine.  After a false start we managed to do it before we went to the lunch, but last night, trying to do one at home was just impossible.  My son-in-law figured out the first puzzle and I finished it after having got a number off him to get me started, but the second one I tried was beyond me.  It didn't help that the TV was showing some Ken Follett story -we got through two episodes on SoHo - and it was hard to concentrate.  The story was about one of the King Edwards, circa 1372, and involved a very large cast with graphic brutality throughout and rapes (at least two) and hangings and a spectacular bridge collapse with hundreds of extras and two sinister murders by one member of the cast (she disposed of her sister-in-law and her brother at different times) and monks who shouldn't have been in the monastery and more.  Not ideal viewing, really.

The lunch for Heather was great; there wasn't a large number of people there, and they were all family members: four adult siblings belonging to her sister and her husband, and two of the four adult boys belonging to her brother and his wife.  There were four grandchildren running around as well, and that was it - apart from us, the only non-family members.  It was quite a full-on day people-wise.  We're quite glad to have a bit of space today!  We'll see our kids all again at Christmas and that's not far away.

Later on the same day, at Kaikoura.  We decided in the end to hire a cabin tonight.  It's been raining on and off all day and it rained very heavily overnight in Christchurch, and things here are also pretty damp.  Anyway, this makes a nice change and we'll get back to tenting when it's drier.  The camp site is a bit run down compared to the other two, but the 'de luxe' cabin we've got (at the standard rate) is fine and has a toaster and jug and crockery and cutlery.  What more could you need?  The double bed is comfortable too...!


13/11/12
Celia actually found the bed quite hard, and unfortunately we'd put both the big quilt on over us and a quilt that was supplied which meant we got hot and then Celia got up at two to go to the loo and that woke me and from then on I just seemed to doze and sleep fitfully.  We hadn't gone to bed till reasonably late and we should have been tired but at the moment nothing seems to help when it comes to sleeping right through the night.  The place overall wasn't up to much and we only saw one other woman staying there - and she seemed to retire early; her curtains were drawn by about six pm.  Two Indians or Pakistanis who seem to be staying there long term came home in the middle of the evening and watched a violent movie in the cabin next door.  There was a lot of shooting and shouting and screaming and what sounded like a prolonged rape scene with the woman screaming endlessly.  The walls between the de luxe units don't muffle very much.  It continued to rain through the night and things were very wet this morning.  But it finally cleared by the time we got moving.

We spent quite a lot of time this morning in Kaikoura down where the Whale Watch boats leave from - it's all very new and tidy - and talked to a young man who was whitebaiting successfully.  Celia got her rod out but didn't catch anything more than seaweed.   She's out fishing again now at a place called Marfells Beach.  There's a Department of Conservation site here and we came down to see what it looked like as a possible place to stay but while it's a nice enough beach and there's room to camp, we've decided to go onto Blenheim.  We've come to the conclusion that camp sites in towns rather than out of them are probably what suit us best. (We're townies at heart.) We walked and drove round Kaikoura last night and this morning: there's a great deal more to it than you first think and it's obviously going ahead at great guns.


Marfells Beach is just past a place called Ward where there doesn't seem to be much more than a very good cafe, but apparently there's a reasonable population somewhere handy as the Lake Grassmere salt works employ quite a lot of people - we passed them after we'd left the beach.  We also stopped off at a church in the middle of nowhere called St Oswald's, but it has beautiful, though traditional, stained glass in every window - unlike the church in Cheviot which boasted of its stained glass yet they seemed to consist of nothing more than coloured panels!  Cheviot's church wasn't open, but this one, way out in the country, had a key in the door!  The little graveyard behind it, with only about six grave sites, is beautifully set, with the sea in the distance, and a lovely overhanging tree.

I'm reading the latest Ian Rankin in the car while Celia's still fishing so there's no rush to move off.

All quiet on the East Anglia front

We went back to Sheringham yesterday. Sheringham, as you might remember, is Celia’s other ‘home.’ On the way we called in at Gresham Church where her parents are buried, along with her grandparents and aunts and uncles. We’d been there once before, back at the beginning of our English stay. Yet again we forgot to take the camera - or rather I did. It’s in my man bag which I haven’t been using much since we got back to England.
Celia dropped her handbag out of the car while we were there, and only discovered later that she didn’t have her cellphone. She’d picked up everything that had dropped, she thought, but obviously the cellphone went somewhere different. Anyway, we weren’t aware of having left it in Gresham until this morning when I tried ringing the phone to see if it was in the car somewhere or around the house. A woman answered, instead. She said she’d found the phone yesterday and had picked it up, thinking it probably belonged to one of the locals. We’ve arranged to go and get it when we get back from our London/Northampton trip. (We leave tomorrow and come back Wednesday.)
We didn’t do anything particularly exciting in Sheringham. Celia just wanted to ‘breath it in’ again. Even managed to avoid picking up anything in the op shops, though we did find four Ian Rankin books that we haven’t read going at £2.50 each.

On the Ferry

21st Oct, 2007
I’m writing this on the Ferry from Civitavecchia (pronounced, roughly, Chiv-ee-ta-veck-ee-ah) to Barcelona. We left over an hour late last night, so it doesn’t look as though we’re going to get into Barcelona (which apparently is spelt, Barcellona, in Spain) until at least an hour late, and maybe longer.
We got to the ferry terminal much too early, being a bit concerned in case we missed the thing. As it was, we sat around from two to six waiting. And reading - more of Ian Rankin. Stood out in the cold waiting to go on board because Celia was concerned that the machine we had to go past might notice that she had knives in her pack - and so we were trying to avoid it! In fact, we didn’t put our luggage through there at all in the end. Maybe they don’t use it anymore.
When we finally got on board we found that the cabin is more than adequate for anyone’s needs: a shower and a toilet included, and bunks and a little couch, and a small desk with a chair. Only about seven foot across, but surprisingly well-designed. We opted for the buffet meal because the ‘proper’ restaurant was expensive. Perhaps we should have gone with the expense: the buffet food was lukewarm, and the beef stew was full of gristle. Very disappointing, and not that cheap for what it was. Breakfast this morning wasn’t much better: very little choice - the only cereal was cornflakes. Never mind, it’s fun being on the boat with hundreds of Italians all doing their usual shouting at each other, and with East Europeans who’ve been shopping in Italy and are bringing all their goodies home.
I didn’t find it easy to sleep, though Celia dropped off while listening to one of her audio books around nine and didn’t get out of bed again until eight this morning. The boat rocks, of course, but that’s no big deal. But when you’re lying in bed you’re much more aware of noises and movement. It shudders continually, but like it’s breathing; so there’s a space and then a shudder, a space and shudder and so on. And every so often it hits a solid rock of a wave, and it sounds like one of the articulated lorries in the hold has come loose and gone for a wander. After this crashing down below had gone on for quite a while this morning, I went and talked to the Purser, and an Italian-speaking guy came round to explain, not long after, that it was the ‘machina’ that was making the noise. It still sounds as though it’s trying to drive a hole in the side of the hold, however!