Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Happiness Is The Road
After brekky we hit the road with today's destination being Napier about 100 kilometres away. The road there was fairly quiet with only minimal aggressive and arrogant tossers to deal with. The landscape along the way was very green and verdant as usual and we drove through a lot of commercial plantation forests. The weather started out gorgeous today and we arrived in Napier under a blue sky. A lot of the roads into Napier were lined with huge palm trees and the place had a very European/Mediterranean feel about it. We did some food shopping at a New World in one of Napier's dodgy feeling suburbs and then went to find the city centre. We parked up on Marine Parade by the sea front, had some lunch, and then went to explore. It felt like Llandudno on a very large acid trip! The beach was most strange. It was covered in dark grey pebbles that looked like they had been artificially dumped there. As if to prove this point there was a big JCB digger right on the beach shovelling the pebbles around. We walked along the sea front soaking up the sun to the town centre which had more than it's fair share of art deco buildings. The city was levelled by an earthquake in 1931 and was rebuilt in the art deco style of the day. The place was rammed with tourists and all the hustle and bustle was getting to us. We needed to relax so we headed to the golf course, the mini golf course that is! We played a very enjoyable eighteen holes of mini golf on a lovely little course next to the sea with both of us getting a couple of hole in one's! It was a closely fought contest which I just edged to victory. On the way back to the camper van we stopped to have a look at an interesting shop called Possum World. It was a wonderfully rustic and quirky shop that sold clothing and souvenirs made from possum fur. It also incorporated a funny possum museum. The possum is not native to New Zealand. It was introduced from Australia and has become a major agricultural and conservation pest. Apart from road kill we have not seen any possums in New Zealand yet although at some point we expect to see one looking shifty on top of a rubbish bin somewhere! We then went to find the camp site which wasn't too far from the city centre. It was a huge place and as it wasn't busy we managed to get a really quiet spot away from other people and more importantly not next to a picnic table. There were however a large number of picnic tables elsewhere on the site with some of them alarmingly grouping up together in more than one place. This extremely worrying and we went to bed with nightmare visions of 'The Night of the Picnic Table' in which a plague of nasty, evil and aggressive picnic tables surround our camper and eat us alive!
- comments