May 21, 2014

May 21, 2014

In Wellington, we drove around for awhile trying to find a spot to park. Since we arrived into Wellington fairly early in the morning, we were lucky enough to find a spot in a parking lot next to the Te Papa Museum. Since we didn't want to lose our spot, we first took a city bus to the Parliament Building. This building is affectionately called "The Beehive" due to its design. We had read about this building while studying New Zealand so this was a must-see for the kids.

Then we walked to a cable car that goes up a hill in the city. The kids enjoyed the ride up the hill and we had a great view of Wellington at the top. There was a cable car museum at the top of the hill. It was very interesting to read about the history of that particular cable car. They had an old cable car that had the original seats that were over 100 years old that we could sit on and take pictures. 

After the cable car, we went to the Te Papa Museum, which was probably the nicest free museum that we have ever been to. It was filled with interactive science displays related to New Zealand. It also had a really cool building across the street painted all over with crazy sharks. 

Then we grabbed lunch at Joe's Garage. The local restaurant had good food and very friendly service, but the hilarious part about it was the chairs. The chairs didn't have arms and the seats kind of curved out in a fan shape. Connor would sit close to the edge with most of his weight on the big curve of the fan. When he got to the right point, the chair would fly out from under him and land with a loud crash on the cement type floors. He also landed in a heap on the floor. He wasn't trying to do this of course, yet he did it three times. The look on his face each time he did it was priceless. The waitress looked horrified and we, along with the other customers, couldn't stop laughing.  After lunch, we checked out the famous Bucket Fountain. This fountain was really fun to watch. It had four different spouts that would slowly pour water into small buckets at the top, when these buckets were full, they would tip into the next buckets and so on and so forth, until the last bucket emptied itself with a loud rush. 


After this, we headed to line up for the ferry to the South Island. Our ferry left later than scheduled so unfortunately we sailed one of the most beautiful ferry rides in the world in the dusk and then dark. Then we drove for another two hours in the dark to make it to our planned stop. Since the ferry was late, we arrived to Nelson over an hour later than planned. All of the campsites were closed! We drove to three of them and couldn't get in to any of them. The last place that we checked out had closed 20 minutes before we got there. If only we had started there first! (It we had cell phones, we could have called. Later, we found out that one of the chains of campgrounds has an after hours bell if you arrive late.) Finally we decided we needed to park somewhere on the street. After vetoing a spot in an industrial area and one next to a grocery store, we settled on a spot on a residential street off the main road. We wanted to find one that wouldn’t get us towed and that seemed safe enough. It felt strange to not have our “campervan crowd” around us. We also ran out of water and had no electricity for the night. We were really roughing it! : )