Day 7 in New Zealand: To the South Island, and Then We Kept Going South

Time has no meaning, because honestly it was zero problem to hop up at 4:15 am and drive through a sleeping Wellington to the Interislander Ferry. 

Really, I preferred it. There's no traffic to fight at 4:15 am!

My favorite thing about riding in a ferry is how well you're herded. I genuinely love nothing better than driving nose to tail at 3 miles per hour in a single line, and at every decision point there's a friendly figure in a high-vis vest to tell me exactly what to do. It's so stress-free not to have to think for myself!

I'm not much of a sailor, and I'd heard that the Cook Strait can be very rough, so as soon as the captain came on the intercom and said that our passage would "not be optimal," omg I started popping the Dramamine like they were Pez.

Not so my beloved and loving partner. Just as he does in every situation in which his spouse might desire comfort, entertainment, and distraction (*cough, cough* 14-hour flight *cough*), he found a seat, sat in it, and proceeded to fall deeply asleep, ne'er to awaken until the announcement came 3+ hours later that it was time to get back to our cars:

We have barely pulled out of the dock, and the man is sound asleep.

Fortunately, we had a bit of time before we actually entered the Cook Strait for me to enjoy myself:

Eventually, however, they closed the outside deck and began to make periodic announcements that people should vomit in a baggie and not in the ferry toilets, and so I spent the next good long while sitting at the furthest window forward and watching the bow go up and down, periodically overdosing on Dramamine and thinking VERY firmly to myself that I was not going to vomit.

Also, I'd left my earbuds in my other fucking bag. Not all adventures are pleasant!

Also also, Cook Strait IS genuinely notorious. I wasn't just being a baby!

I swear to god I about kissed the ground when we arrived in Picton, but above all, we must carry on with the sightseeing, so rather than engage in my most preferred activity of the moment, which was to die, we instead bought some Christmas candy at a local candymaker, and did a wine tasting and bought some wine at a local winemaker:

I actually just finished that bottle of wine a couple of nights ago, and I miss it! I don't normally love white wines, but this one was very nice. Also, fun fact: instead of a tasting room, the New Zealand wineries have a "cellar door." More semantic translation fun!

So... it may have been after-effects of the seasickness, or it may have been jetlag, or to be honest I definitely overdosed on Dramamine in an anxious panic there on the Cook Strait, so it may have been that, but after we got back in the car I dunno what happened for a good long while. I just sort of greyed out, and when I was back online we were on the coast!

Did we even eat lunch at some point? I really have no fucking idea. All I really recall from the entire drive from Hunter's Winery to the coast is that in this rental car, every time we turned it on it would connect to my phone via Bluetooth, which was AWESOME because there was a screen that would display my Google Maps on the dash for my partner to see. Do newer American cars do that, too? I wouldn't know, because our personal American cars are a billion years old, ahem. Anyway, when it did that, it would also for some reason connect to my Spotify and just start playing the Fleet Foxes radio playlist, which... is fine, I guess? I mean, it was almost Thanksgiving at that point, which means that White Winter Hymnal is pretty much required daily consumption. But also, that playlist is less than three hours long, and it came on EVERY time we started the car, and played continuously the entire time we were in the car, and the couple of times I tried to turn it off, or even to change playlists, it fucked up the GPS so my partner suddenly couldn't see where he was going in the middle of traffic, so I eventually was too scared to touch it and we just listened to Fleet Foxes radio whenever we were in the car. So ANYWAY, I'm not sure what else happened during that drive, but what I recall from it is just sort of a Fleet Foxes, and Fleet Foxes adjacent, sense memory. 

This Vampire Weekend song is very good, by the way. I heard it maybe 1,000 times over the nine days we were in New Zealand?

Oh, you know what, you guys? I have literally just had the realization that I probably should NOT have chased 3+ Dramamine with a couple of glasses of wine at 11:00 am. Whatever, it's fine. Neither of my travel companions can remember whether or not we had a proper lunch that day, either, and neither of them were compromised.

By the time we reached the trailhead for the Cape Foulwind Seal Colony Lookout (three and a half hours later, ahem...), I was more or less fine-ish and ready for a nice hike in the brisk fresh air!

The hike was almost exactly as was described--there were no "foul" winds (although it was VERY windy... was that what they meant by "foul?"), but there were rocks, and there was a lookout, and from the lookout, we could see seals on the rocks!

There is no soap opera that can match the drama of seals fighting over nothing on their rocks:

The drive down the coast afterwards was breathtaking (my partner states that the drive across the island was also breathtaking, particularly the part that followed the river, but I have no memory of this), and we got to our last stop at Punakaiki at just the right time, right at high tide so we could see the blowholes near the Pancake Rocks:

Lol at the photo below, because I was fighting for my life on those stairs!

Our hotel was in a beautiful spot sandwiched between the cliffs and the beach, and the kid and I had a lovely, long walk along that beach before it started spitting down rain again. We had a delicious, hot pub dinner, long, hot showers, and we were going to try to find a movie on the local cable, but I fell asleep before it even got started.

Tomorrow, we see the glaciers!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Rotorua

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!