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.