All morning Sue cleaned our apartment in Napier. It was raining off and on — too bad for Graeme who was busy on the beach, burying ‘treasure’ for the kids to dig up as part of Napier’s Art Deco Festival. He and Robyn came around in mid-morning and asked their new B&B guests to take a photo of the four of us. 

It was nearly noon when we were all packed up and ready to go. We ate the leftover pizza from last night for a quick lunch. We walked across the road to the beach and had a look at the kids digging in the sand — not many kids there, but at least (for the moment) it wasn’t raining. Then we got into the car, punched the Wellington B&B address into Google, and set off. It was supposed to take 4:15 to get to Wellington. And it was raining for most of the trip.

At around 2 hours into the drive, making pretty good time with not too much other traffic on the road, we stopped at a cafe in a little town and had a coffee. Then drove the rest of the way. We turned off the #2 highway and wound our way up a narrow side street to our B&B on the side of the hill. We checked in. Nice view from the window — we can see the big sports stadium just across the trees, and the port too, with the Interislander Ferry terminal just below us. There was a big Carnival ship in port too. 

Our host told gave us directions to an area about half-an-hour’s walk down the hill from our place where we would find lots of restaurants and pubs. So, after a bit of unpacking, and after we’d booked our Interislander ferry for Monday morning, down into town we went. We took our rain jackets along, but only had some light sprinkles on our way back home at around 8pm. We found a pub in town and ordered a couple of lamb shanks for dinner. They were nearly as good as the ones we had with the Dickeys back in Napier. 

Back in our room, we sat around and used our phones as hotspots so Sue could look for a B&B for Monday night when we cross to the South Island and so I could write and post my journal. Although the B&B write-up advertised free wifi, there was no connection to the internet on their wifi! So, lucky for us, we have tons of data on our phone plans (which will expire at the end of February) so we used that. The other disappointment with our B&B is that the photos showed a lovely big flat-screen TV — but now we find that there is no TV reception! What they DO have is a small library of DVDs for us to watch. Oh well, maybe we’ll go see a movie in town tomorrow (if it rains all day again).

And that’s what we did on Saturday.