Author: neil

For breakfast we brought out our insulating foam mat to sit on at the picnic table, something we haven’t used in months, partly because it hasn’t been this cold, but mostly because we rarely use picnic tables in New Zealand; at holiday parks we eat in the kitchen in normal chairs, and at DOC sites…

Yesterday in Featherston we were briefly on SH2, the main trunk connecting the population centers of the eastern half of the North Island. We then branched off onto SH53, which “dead ends” at Martinborough. Obviously the road doesn’t end, but the State Highway designation does, and today we proceed south on narrowing twigs of the…

Even though we fast-forwarded ourselves off the South Island by taking the train from Christchurch to Picton, it would still be a tight and stressful effort to ride from Wellington and get to Hobbiton in time. Or more-precisely, getting to Hobbiton on time would require us to ride the most-direct route possible, which 1) wouldn’t…

Day 2 Despite spending 12 nights in Wellington around the Christmas holidays, we still hadn’t seen all the ‘Lord of the Rings’ sites in the area that we wanted to see. This is partly because we were too busy/lazy, but also because Wellington has the highest concentration of locations since it’s the “Hollywood” of New…

I got the feeling that some of the other people at the holiday park were there for multiple nights waiting for vehicle slots to open up on the ferry. One of Interislander’s three boats had been unexpectedly out of service for the past couple days, so that presumably screwed a lot of people as they…