Author: Rudy

Today was a ‘day off’. Well, it was SUPPOSED to be a day off. We lazed around all morning. Sue really wanted to finish reading her book club book (even though her friend Noreen has already emailed her twice, telling her how the book ends!) and I needed to do my best to finish the ‘borrowed’ motel book. So we goofed around all morning, watching YouTube videos of all the late night talk shows making fun of Donald Trump, and reading the Steinbach, and Winnipeg, and Canada news, and watching the couple in the room next to us frying up bacon and eggs on the ‘community’ barbecue in the back yard, etc. And NO reading.

And before you know it it was 11:30, high time for lunch. So we had lunch. And THEN we sat down to do some serious reading. Oh, but first Sue had to email some friends, and then phone her sisters, and then see if she could alter our flights home with WestJet (nope, she couldn’t — that old ‘travel agent’ thing doesn’t work quite like it used to). And I had a bit of a Skype with my parents. And then we FaceTimed with Max and his parents. And THEN I did some reading. And all the while, we had decided to use our two remaining golf passes tomorrow. And I told Sue that maybe we should rather golf today; you never know, it might rain tomorrow. And she said no, today was our reading day. And then she said I should call the golf course to make sure we could get a tee time tomorrow. And I said SHE should call the golf course. And she said, ‘No, YOU call the golf course.’ But I didn’t. And then at around 3 o’clock (I guess she was tired of reading), Sue calls the golf course. What? Tournament tomorrow and NO tee times available. How about today. Yes, you can come right away. Shoot! Well, you know it’s all MY fault (of course) — Sue says, ‘I told you to call the golf course!’

No big deal. Although the sky is looking a bit dark over the top of the big hill to the south, the temperature is PERFECT, the breeze is light, and I was getting tired of reading anyway. We take our clubs out of the trunk (boot) and head down to the course. The guys standing at the first tee suggest we go ahead of them. Great! And we’re off. Great tee shots. We chase down the fairway after our balls, hoping the guys on the tee can see just how far along we are. Second shot. Dribble, dribble dribble. Topped the ball. It rolls into the long grass. Oh boy! And then on the second tee I smacked my new favourite fluorescent yellow Titleist  golf ball sideways into the river. But I persevere. What’s past is past. So you won’t have a great score for the round; why not just count pars and birdies like Ed Hildebrand (Lorette) always does? Besides, it’s a beautiful afternoon, the guys ahead are not holding us back, and the guys behind are far enough behind us that there’s no rush. Let’s ENJOY the round!

Okay, so I was not playing very well. But you should have seen (and heard) my playing partner. Jeepers, you’d think she was on the pro tour! After EVERY SINGLE SHOT she whined and complained at length about how terrible the course was. She would hit a near-perfect shot and then watch as the ball took a hard bounce to the right. Or she’d putt and consistently the ball would end up at least five feet to the right of the hole. And then she’d get mad (I’ve already cautioned her about throwing her clubs), and it was all I could do to try to keep her spirits up, and encourage her, and say ‘Great shot!’, and just generally ‘cheerlead’ my way around the course. And then, after nine holes (and she’s still steamed about ‘having to go golfing today’), she’s only BEATING me by SEVEN STROKES! 

The back nine went more-or-less like the front nine, except that all that complaining seemed to catch up with Sue, and I finally stopped complimenting and encouraging her after EVERY SINGLE SHOT. And I played a bit better (and didn’t lose any more balls), and Sue had some unlucky shots. And when it was all said and done (and I mean SAID and done), we walked off the course at 7:30 TIED (at 105 — nothing to brag about for either of us).

So that means that we get ANOTHER ‘day off’ tomorrow, to read our books and laze around. And as challenging as it was to try to keep Sue feeling positive on the golf course, once we got home she was completely happy again. And when she’s got some corn-on-the-cob to cook up in a too-small pot, and some rice and chicken with (leftover from yesterday’s Thai take away) coconut cream sauce to heat up for supper — well,  all is right with the world and she is in her element. And that’s great for me, too.

So now it’s 8:30. The dishes are done, the doors and windows are open to allow the cooling breeze to blow through our motel room, the sky is dark, and it’s time to cue up the final two episodes of the “O.J” series on Netflix. And I’m quickly writing my journal, trying to stay ahead of the game. And now I’m done — gotta go watch TV. See you tomorrow.

This morning after breakfast I went to the motel office to get a book to read — they have a small ‘library’ of books other visitors have left behind, but both Phil and Jill (really! those are the names of the couple who own and manage this motel!) declared that all the books were for women and I wouldn’t want to read any of those ‘sappy’ books. But I found ONE book that Jill said was a pretty good “guy’s” book.

I walked over to the golf club pro shop, which is just down the driveway from our motel, and bought a special card that gives us 4 rounds for $125. And I booked 2 of those rounds for one o’clock this afternoon. Then back to the room to start reading my motel novel.

Meanwhile Sue was checking out hotel options for us after we leave here on Saturday. She booked something in Palmerston North for a couple of nights. And then she took her little notebook and her calculator (iPad) outside and sat under the shade of the patio where the communal barbecue is and did some accounting. It’s her way of doing “month end”. We’ve been gone January and February; now it’s up to Sue to make sure we have enough money to make it through to the end of March.

After lunch it was time to head over to the golf course. We took the clubs out of our car trunk (or “boot”, as they say here) and walked to the first tee. Another great day for golf: warm, partly cloudy, an ocean breeze to keep things comfortable. The course was quite busy this morning when I was here but not so bad now. We had a great time walking the 18 holes this afternoon. Sue was a bit frustrated with her game, but what else is new? It’s golf!

We finished at around 5pm. We went upstairs to check out the clubhouse restaurant — looks very good — we’ll maybe get our supper here on Friday after we’ve golfed our next rounds here.

Happy hour back at the motel. I was thinking we should drive into town and go to the Vietnamese restaurant for supper. But in the end I phoned a Thai restaurant and ordered ‘take away’ instead. I drove into downtown (about a 15 minute drive OVER the big hill each way) and picked it up and we had supper at our own kitchen table in our motel.

I’d spent part of the morning trying to figure out a way to get my AppleTV to connect to the wifi of the hotel. Now it was time to put it to the test. So we watched a couple more episodes of the Netflix “O.J. Simpson” series. Of course we followed that up with the CBC National News, and a few YouTube videos from the evening talk shows after that. Went to bed just before midnight.

We slept in today — woke up at 8:30. Sue got breakfast ready and then we packed our suitcases. We were on the road by a little after ten.

The ride up to Nelson was just over 400kms — and took us just over 6 hours. The weather was great. The traffic was okay too. There was quite a lot of road construction — the one two-lane road (the other one is damaged by the earthquake) down to Christchurch had repair crews conducting single-lane traffic in about 20 different places along the way.

We ate our lunch (sandwiches) in the car along the way. When we got to the Greens Motel in Nelson it was around 4 o’clock. We checked in — we’ve got 4 nights here before we plan to take the ferry back to the North Island. Our room is a large room with a separate bedroom and a small kitchen. We unpacked. We skyped with Dave and Marylou for a while — they are leaving Phoenix tomorrow, where they’ve been since the beginning of January, heading for home.

After our visit with the Driedgers we drove into town to the grocery store to stock our fridge. Sue made supper. After supper we watched another episode of the O.J. series on Netflix. By 11 it we were in bed.

The sun was shining again when we woke up this morning. We had breakfast and then Sue did a load of laundry. We set up the drying rack in our ‘living room’ and turned on the in-room air conditioner to help along. Then we got into the car and drove into Christchurch’s “downtown”.

We parked in a car park and started walking. We’d heard so much about how the city’s efforts to rebuild after the February 2011 earthquake devastated much of big parts of the Central Business District were mired in red tape and stalling by government and the insurance companies. We wanted to see some of that for ourselves. So we were not altogether surprised by the number of broken buildings. And there were construction barriers around many properties. And cranes and caterpillars and hammering and grinding and construction workers. And still SO MUCH to do — how can they even keep their spirits up and keep on going? We walked around the ‘Re:Start Mall’, an area where big shipping containers were brought in right after the quake in order to give shops a place to display their merchandise and try to keep their business going. We went to a museum that featured displays and videos of interviews with people who were there when the quake hit.

After eating lunch in the downtown, we drove down to the Botanical Garden, a huge park not far from the downtown. We parked our car and took a long walk around the paths in the park — alongside the river that ran through the park. Ducks and flowers and trees and green grass areas and lots of people enjoying the sunny afternoon. We ended up at another museum, the Canterbury Museum. This one featured displays about the early Maori people, the cultural and natural heritage of New Zealand, as well as some curiosities and oddities from around the Canterbury region. Really a good little museum. 

We were back at our apartment by around 4. By that time the Oscars were nearly over so we marked the winners on our ‘ballots’. For supper we walked down our street for about a block to a little Fish ‘n Chips place and ordered ‘take away’. After supper we sat down and watched 3 episodes of the 10-part Netflix series, “O.J.: Made in America”, which won the Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards today. At eleven we tuned into Sunday’s ‘The National’ on CBC. And that was the end of a pretty fun day here in Christchurch. We’ll spend the last day of February driving for 5 hours back up to Nelson, near the north end of the South Island, where we plan to hang out until next weekend.

We woke up, showered, had breakfast, and left our AirBnb in Queenstown shortly after nine. It was a warm but cloudy day, but the weather forecast for Christchurch was sunny. Google Maps said we were in for almost six hours of driving today. 

After about two and a half hours were were between Twizel and Tekapo, driving along the shore of Lake Pukaki. The Lake was a bright blue-green. And across the lake, in the distance, standing tall alongside other snow-covered mountains, we could see Mt Cook (3,724 metres), the highest mountain in New Zealand. I think we were lucky to see it — not long after these photos were taken the clouds shrouded the mountain from our view.

The drive took us across the South Island of New Zealand. The last 150 of our 500km drive was along the #1 highway near the east coast. Here the landscape was comparatively flat, not unlike the prairies at home. Sure, there were still lots of fields of sheep, but we also saw herds of cattle and big fields of wheat and other agricultural crops. And while most of the day had seen only light traffic, the road up to Christchurch felt a bit like the ride from Falcon Lake to Winnipeg on a summer Sunday afternoon, when everyone is heading home after the weekend at the lake. And that forecast for sun? It rained for the last hour of our drive.

At around 3pm we pulled into Christchurch. We were about a mile from our destination when we spotted a ‘Countdown’ grocery store. We pulled in and picked up stuff for breakfast and lunch fixings. Then we found our next B&B, this one a furnished studio apartment where we’ll plant ourselves for the next two nights.

We moved in and checked things out. Very good. Then we sat down and had a late lunch — leftover pizza and sushi. It was still raining and a bit cool, but our apartment had air conditioning and a heater and soon it was very comfortable in there. I hooked up my AppleTV to the big TV on the wall and Sue and I watched another movie from our Oscar list, “Loving” (Best Actress). We still had one more ‘big’ movie to see, “Fences”, so we ended our evening by watching that (Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Screenplay). That more-or-less catches us up for the Academy Awards, which take place tomorrow afternoon (which is Sunday night at home). I don’t think we’ll get to watch the Oscars — at least not on our TV here. But we’ll do our own voting here, and see how we make out tomorrow.

We woke up at 7. Actually, I woke up at 7 — Sue said she didn’t sleep last night! Good thing she doesn’t have to drive today. We’re taking the bus for a 4.5 hour bus ride out to Milford Sound and after a 1.5 hour ride on a boat, we’re coming back home on that same bus. That’s a lot of sitting on the bus, but at least it’s not as stressful as helping Rudy drive the car.

Our hosts didn’t come home until after we’d left this morning. Breakfast was toast and fruit and coffee. We were at the bus station about 5kms from here by 8:50, and the ‘Jucy’ bus was there to pick us up just before 9. We were lucky to be the last pickup of the morning — some of the passengers had already been sitting on the bus for nearly an hour. In fact, the bus was full and it looked for a minute like Sue and I wouldn’t be sitting together — but the driver ordered a single guy to move next to a single girl and that opened up 2 prime seats in the second row for us. 

The driver didn’t stop his (monotone) running commentary in a very thick Kiwi accent until about and hour and a half into the trip. Finally he put on some ’70s music instead. The weather was cloudy and we had a few drizzly and even rainy spells on our drive to Milford Sound. Milford Sound is a fairly deep fiord on the south west coast of New Zealand. From Queenstown it is only about 70km by air but about 300km by bus. And it is a winding, but very scenic drive. We made numerous stops enroute for short walks and to take photos. We stopped the the town of Te Anau for lunch. It was almost 3pm when we got to Milford Sound and boarded our boat. Sue and I bought our tickets online and had opted for the ‘included pita lunch’ option. Oops — that was a mistake. We could buy them on the boat for the same price and after we shared one pita wrap we were stuffed and had to pack the second one into our bag to take home with us.

The boat cruise was better than we’d expected. The forecast had called for an 80% chance of rain, but the clouds actually lifted as we cruised the 15km trip from the dock out to the Tasman Sea that separates New Zealand from Australia. We saw quite a few very tall waterfalls, and even stuck the nose of the boat into one so that the young people who were standing on the bow could get soaked. 

Next to us on the bus sat an older couple from Great Britain. We had a nice time chatting with them on the trip there and back. They travelled a lot, and said that for the last dozen years or so they spent more time in their home in Florida each year than they did in the U.K. 

It was 9pm when the bus dropped us off where we’d parked our car on the road beside a bus shelter. We drove back to our AirBnB. The hosts were snuggled up on the couch in the living room, watching some crappy reality show on TV. Their big dog welcomed me home by sniffing my crotch and licking my hands and putting his big face right into mine as I sat down on the couch. Yeah, I know — I’m supposed to be really ga-ga about how great our hosts’ dog is, and gush about how cute he is, and play with him, and love him to pieces — but somehow that just seems wrong. I’m paying THEM to be nice and friendly to ME, not the other way around.

Sue zapped our leftover pita in the microwave and we shared it over a glass of wine. We sat on the couch for a few minutes and showed some interest in the crappy TV show and then excused ourselves and went to bed. We’d had a great day today, but we’ll be quite okay leaving here tomorrow shortly after ‘breakfast’ and heading across the island to the east coast for a couple of nights in ‘our own’ apartment in Christchurch.

We woke up at around 7. It was cool and misty outside, but it was going to be another warm sunny day ahead. Sue thought we should head into the communal kitchen before everyone else woke up, but that didn’t happen. So after a shower down we went to inspect the zoo that was breakfast — 3 waffle irons with hungry athletes blocking everyone else from getting near the slop-pail of pancake mix, a couple of big toasters surrounded by young girls in oversize t-shirts and pajama pants, the big tub of muesli already three-quarters empty, one young employee doing her best to mix up more powdered milk but barely able to keep up with demand, instant coffee and tea to mix with the hot water boiler mounted on the wall, and nary a place to sit — all the picnic tables and ratty old couches already occupied. Sue made us each a slice of toast with marmalade and we went outside and joined to older german guys on the porch of the building next door. They were devouring their plate of toast, and after they’d eaten that they took out the other half a loaf of sliced bread they’d pilfered from the kitchen and began making sandwiches for themselves for ‘on the road’. Maybe they are cycling — I did see a couple of bicycles with big packs behind our room where the tents were set up.

I filled up with gas before leaving town. Our little Toyota still had about a quarter tank left, but gas stations are few and far between here on the west coast, and I’d rather be safe than stranded. Gas is a little more expensive here than up north — $73 for 3/4 tank! $2.23/litre. But it was worth it. We had a GREAT ride down to Queenstown today.

We started the day in the mountains — and half an hour after Franz Josef we drove through the Fox Glacier village. Then we began the switchbacks down the mountains. We stopped for lunch at a large roadside cafe in Makarora. And then the highlight of the day, the drive first up and then down alongside Lake Hawea, through Albert Town and then Arrow Junction, and finally to our AirBnB in Shotover, just outside of Queenstown. The 340km drive took us four-and-a-half hours, not counting the stops. A lot of winding roads!

We checked in at our B&B. Sarah, our host, was just finishing up with some gardening. The home is in a brand new development. Sarah and her husband Morgan have a 6-month-old baby girl and a big dog. We checked into our room and then sat outside at the patio table and had a cool libation. Morgan came home from work. The whole household is going out tonight, leaving at 5pm, and possibly not returning until tomorrow morning.

Sue and I decided to take a drive into town. We parked our car and took a walk around. Wow! What a great town! Sue remembered Queenstown as one of her least favourite New Zealand towns when she visited here some 30 or so years ago. Not so today! The small town (about the same population as Steinbach) cradles crystal clear Lake Wakatipu. There are lots of restaurants, bars, and shops all around the waterfront. And the beautiful large Queenstown Gardens on one end of the bay. 

At around 7pm we were getting hungry. But instead of taking advantage of all the great restaurants and live music and great looking people that were all around us in downtown Queenstown — well hey, it’s Friday night, and that means it’s Pizza Night.

We stopped by a pizza joint and ordered take away. We drove back to our B&B and were a bit surprised to learn that our hosts had decided to take their dog with them for the night. Whew! Good for us. We plopped ourselves down in front of the TV and watched nothing good while eating our pizza. We opened up all the doors so the evening breeze could flow through the house and cool it down a bit. 

By ten o’clock we were ready for bed. We’ve got an easy day planned for tomorrow — a 4-hour bus ride to Milford Sound, a 2-hour boat ride, and then a return bus trip. We’ll be gone from 9 to 9. And it’s supposed to rain in Milford Sound! When I mentioned that to our host Morgan he said, “Good. At least you’ll have less sand flies!” Sounds like Manitoba! 

Sue repacked our 2 suitcases this morning — the big one stays in the trunk, the smaller one has what we need for the next 3 days and comes in with us every night. She made two ‘pots’ of coffee in our motel room french press and that was it for ‘breakfast’. We hit the road at around 9 o’clock. Since our drive down to the Franz Josef Glacier is just following highway #6 down the west coast I decided NOT to use google maps on my phone as the GPS; and instead I tried Maps.ME, a ‘free’ app that uses downloaded map data and so doesn’t need to have access to live data. It doesn’t have traffic updates, but it’s free, and I really don’t need traffic updates today. Well, it was like we had a new passenger in the car with us. We immediately noticed the new ‘voice’ of Maps.ME. She sounded a little grumpy, and although the app worked very well, it took us a while to get used to her saying, “In 900 metres, keep straight.” and then in 900 metres, even though there was no roundabout or intersection, she’d say, “Keep straight.” Hmmm… not really a choice, so I guess we’ll ‘keep straight’!

The drive down to Franz Josef was beautiful and uneventful. It IS amazing the diverse range of geography we see in such a short time. Plains, desert, tropical jungle, snow-covered majestic mountains, beaches, rocky shorelines, swampy ‘everglades’, etc. Like the lady from Brandon that we met in that honey shop many weeks ago said, New Zealand is very like Canada, but with all the regions of Canada ‘squished together’.

We pulled into Franz Joseph at around 1pm. Lunch time. We checked into our hostel and headed to the nearby ‘Four Square’ grocery store to buy a sandwich and a pastry. We sat on at a street-side table and had lunch. The hostel ‘manager’ had told us not to buy the $75 walking tour; just drive the 4kms to the big car park at the beginning of the trail and follow the signs along the path. So that’s what we did.

We didn’t expect to be able to get right up to the glacier — but very close. And once again, the paths and the parking and the facilities and signage were typically New Zealand ‘top-notch’. A 45-minute walk should get us near to the glacier. I ‘knipst’ a few photos of the pathway and signs and the glacier along the way. When we got to the end we were a bit disappointed that the path ahead was now closed: apparently a big rock slide had blocked the path ahead. Oh well, if that’s how it is, that’s how it is. We turned around and headed back to the car. And then back to our hostel.

We asked if we could cancel our booking — we still had most of a beautiful afternoon ahead of us, and we thought perhaps we could shorten tomorrow’s drive down to Queenstown a bit by getting a head start today. Unfortunately the guy at the front desk said he couldn’t do that. Okay. Then we’ll check into our room (private double with ensuite — none of that ’12 bunks sharing a bathroom’ business for old farts like us) and read until it’s time for supper.

While I don’t think we’re quite ready to ‘hostel’ our way around like we did a dozen years ago, it was quite interesting watching the goings-on at the hostel all day. Not too many fat Brits and Americans (or ‘hippos’, as we’ve come to call them) stay in hostels. But lots of attractive young lads and lasses do. They come in carrying HUMUNGOUS backpacks, wearing cute little tank tops, very short shorts, and big hiking boots, and carrying grocery bags. And they gather at the outdoor picnic tables and play cards and laugh a lot and look at their phones. And at 6 o’clock sharp, the whole lot of them hurry over to the big shared kitchen where they will enjoy the ‘free soup’ the hostel advertises. And did I say they are gorgeous?

We walked the one block to the main street and turned left. First restaurant was full, but they sent us to check out the upstairs. Just then a super long limo pulled up and about 10 very rowdy young hooligans climbed out and entered the restaurant. We went next door — there was a little Chinese ‘Take-Away’ there. Hey, we can do that. We ordered our food and while it was being cooked we walked down the street to the Four Square to buy another bottle of wine and a six-pack. By the time we were back at the take-away our ‘beeper’ told us the food was ready. We took our bags back to the hostel and ‘made a party’ on the deck in front of our room. Supper! Super! By now all the rooms on the second floor of our building were booked — all doubles with ensuite, i.e. old people’s rooms. And in front of each patio door, sitting at their little round tables just like we were, elderly (in age, but surely not in spirit) couples, having their dinner and sipping their drinks while the sun went down and the mist rolled in. While down below us in the big lounges, the music was thumping and the young ‘uns were eating and enjoying themselves. 

By 9:00 pm the little no-see-ums and mosquitoes chased us into our room, where we sat on our bed and looked for studio apartments to rent in Christchurch on AirBnB. Always a fun and satisfying experience 😉

After breakfast we said goodbye to our hosts, Jon and Sarah, in Nelson. We drove down towards the west coast of the South Island. Since the earthquake last November made the east coast main highway down to Christchurch impassable, traffic is now re-routed through Nelson and down the west side. That made traffic for the first half of our drive today busier than normal. Still, it was a very lovely relaxed drive. The weather was great, and the road was good, too. 

At around 1pm we had a lunch break in Westport — Sue and I shared a Subway sandwich, much to Sue’s chagrin. That left a 1-hour drive to our hotel in Greymouth without stops. But we made stops. 

The drive along the coast here was spectacular. The vegetation is lush and green and even ‘tropical’ — lots of palm trees and those ferns that New Zealand is famous for. The roads are in good condition, but whenever you come to a bridge, and that is fairly regularly, you need to watch the sign to see if your lane has the right of way — and if you don’t, you’ll need to wait until oncoming traffic has crossed the single-lane bridge, and then it’s our turn. Simple, but it works. Lots of things about New Zealand are ‘practical’ like that. I’m now convinced that traffic circles work, and that they are a MUCH more efficient way of dealing with intersections than what we have at home.

Back to the drive. Our best stop enroute today was at Paparos National Park, also known as ‘Pancake Rocks’. We parked the car and followed the walkway built for visitors out to the seaside. There were ‘viewpoints’ along the way, each offering a great photo opportunity. So I took photos. Again, this is such a typical ‘kiwi’ thing — they love their natural environment here. Walks, hikes (or ‘tramps’ as they’re called here), cycling, mountain biking, surfing, fishing and hunting, camping and especially camper vans — New Zealand promotes outdoor physical activity and New Zealanders love to travel, abroad, but also within their own country. And the government has focussed on making things accessible, like the pathway around these pancake rocks, but also with bike and hiking paths throughout the country. Anyway, here are lots of photos of the pancake rocks (so-called because the layers of shale you see might suggest a pile of thin pancakes).

We arrived in Greymouth at around 4pm and checked into our hotel. The hotel and our hotel room appeared to have undergone recent renovations, and we were quite pleased with our booking. We unpacked, poured ourselves a drink, and unwound a bit. At around 7pm we walked over to the hotel restaurant. We had a fine supper meal, during which we got a return phone call from the mother-in-law of Sue’s nephew Scott. We don’t really know Kayla’s parents, but they just finished a 4-day glacier hike in Franz Josef Park (where we’re heading tomorrow), and Sue had emailed them yesterday to see if we might meet for coffee in Greymouth today. Kayla’s mom suggested that we join them for a hike here tomorrow, but we’d just booked a place in Franz Josef and were planning to leave here early tomorrow so a phone call would have to suffice. 

Back in our room Sue got finally got her CNN fix. And I tried to upload my humungous photo gallery. I guess everyone else in this hotel is downloading movies and ‘the pipe’ is a bit slow right now. Oh well, at least we can watch a bit of Trump on TV!

Woke up and the first thing on the agenda was figuring out WHERE we are going tomorrow and WHERE we are staying tomorrow night. We had pretty much decided that we’d just drive right on down to Christchurch (about 8 hour drive). There were really no places to stay in between and nothing here in Nelson looked all that inviting either.

We had breakfast out on the deck and then Jon and Sarah joined us out there to give us THEIR opinions of the cities down in the southern half of the South Island (not very good!) They gave us quite a few tips and suggestions. The lived in Christchurch until 2 years ago. Christchurch had a major earthquake 6 years ago — one of the biggest insurance claims ever — and their house had some major damage and needed to be rebuilt. When their frustration with the insurance companies dragged on for four years they decided to take a cash settlement and move up to Nelson.

When it was time for lunch we went back to our room and Sue got on the phone to expedia to book us a night in the Ashley Hotel in Greymouth, a small old gold-mining town on the West coast, about 4.5 hours from here. We think we’ll tackle a trip down the West Coast first, then come up on the East side, from Christchurch on back up to Nelson. Well, booking on the phone with expedia is no simple little thing, it turns out. It was WAY past lunch when finally we hung up the phone.

We went to McD’s for lunch — Sue had her muffin and cappuccino and I had cheeseburger and fries. We sat there and discussed things a bit. Then we got in the car and went to the i-Site Tourist Info place to ask about possibilities for long-term (1 or 2 weeks) stays in the region. Sorry, but all the accommodations are booked — it would be hard to find anything that is remotely like what we think we’re looking for.

Next we drove a few miles out of town to a ‘property management’ company, hoping that perhaps they might have something for us. (We’d been given the recommendation by Chris and Angela, B&B hosts where we stayed in Rotorua quite a few weeks ago.) But the address for the ‘office’ led us to what looked to be a residential home up in the hills behind the city of Nelson. Not going there.

It was around 3pm when we drove along the coast back the other way and found the Nelson Golf Course. It wasn’t quite time for the 4 o’clock “twilight rates” to kick in, so we went next door to the new Motel complex to enquire about long term rates. They were already booked for many of our dates, but we DID manage to put something on hold for us should we be back in this part of the country by the beginning of March.

Then we got out our clubs and walked the links-style golf course that is between the sea and a small airport for 18 holes of golf. Very much fun. Sue enjoyed it much more than yesterday’s course because the sea breeze made it more comfortable in the hot sun, and because there were no sand flies to bug us on this course, and because she managed to make at least three longer-than-20-yard (oops, that should be 20-foot!) putts in the first nine holes! THAT is some good golf!

It was 7:30 by the time we finished golfing. We went back into the town of Nelson and found a ‘Mexican’-style restaurant. Very good food, very good service, lots of people eating here. Actually, many of the ‘ethnic’ restaurants on this street were quite busy on this Tuesday night. It’s a nice little town; if it wasn’t so booked up we’d probably be happy to stay here for a couple of weeks.

Back at our B&B, Jon and Sarah were sitting in front of one of their big TV screens when we got home just before 9. They greeted us, but soon headed off to bed. Another long hard evening of TV watching, I guess. Sue and I sat out on the deck for a little while, checking our devices. Then we too went off to our bedroom. While Sue scouted out what comes after Greymouth tomorrow night, I wrote my journal. And then we too were off to bed.