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We arrived in a pretty sunny Nelson and we had to look away at first cause our eyes weren't used to that much light.
The drive from Picton was insane though! We literally went around and up and down a mountain on the way to Nelson and that meant really wide, narrow curves basically all the time and we felt like we were driving a go-kart.
One thing that we've noticed while travelling around this country is that the people here drive like crazy!
On the way down the mountain, driving in 35 mph due to the constant curves around the mountain, we had two cars actually overtaking us while going around the curve!!! Both me and Dave went ballistic and started shouting, honking and making angry hand gestures (Dave, not me) and they just smiled and waved at us. That was the stupidest, most dangerous thing I've seen someone do while driving and it makes me so angry that people don't have more respect for the road and the people on it than that.
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Yesterday, after checking in we had a little stroll around town, which is beautiful and made us realise that we much prefer smaller cities from the bigger ones (Wellington).
Since we arrived rather late and all the shops started closing up at around 4, we went to Countdown supermarket and got some groceries and dinner and headed back to the hostel for a game of ping pong!
Then, after kicking Davids rumpa fairly quickly, I started making dinner - mashed potatoes with fried onions, boiled carrots and pork chops. It was delicious if I may say so myself!
The evening was spent in the games room playing Trivial Pursuit, this one with questions from this century, which made it lots easier and more competitive.
After wiping the floor with David on that, as well, we went to bed.
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Saturday was the farmers market in Nelson and it was the biggest and best one we've been to so far. Lots and lots of stands with everything you can imagine and we spent over an hour walking around looking at everything and buying a present or two, for ourselves and others.
We bought some fresh vegetables and I got some delicious liquorice fudge in honour of "the liquorice day".
When the market was over we strolled around in town, got some lunch and stumbled across a Fro-Yo place!! It was beyond delicious! They had 4 different flavours; natural, strawberry, pomegranate and apple pie and then there was tons of fresh fruit and berries, candy, chocolate and different sauces such as nutella and strawberry sauce. So nice and fresh!
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Sunday was spent trying to duck the rain, which unfortunately has started to become a tradition, and we went to visit the WOW (World of Wearable art) & Classic cars museum.
It wasn't as big as we'd thought, but it was quite cool. There were some really weird pieces of "clothing" made from designers all of the world, for example a dress made out of bread tags!
Dave found the classic cars part far more interesting and I think he managed to take a picture of almost every car. Myself, I power walked through it, only stopping at the "Titanic cars" and at a chair shaped like a car so I could sit down.
On the way back to the hostel we took a left turn and ended up in Stoke!
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On Monday, on our last day in Nelson, we continued our Lord of the Rings tour and paid a visit to Jens the ring makers shop and had a look at the ring of Elrond, we saw the ring makers own interpretation of Gandalf, Galadriel and Aragorns rings and of course, one of the actual movie rings were there. It was pretty cool to see and all of the rings are really beautiful!
We are really disappointed that the weather has been so bad during our visit to Nelson as that has meant we haven't been able to go to Abel Tasman National Park, which was one of our most anticipated place to see on our trip. Of course it's possible to go when it's raining, but it won't do the beautiful scenery and nature justice and we held out for as long as we could to see if the weather would turn around, but it didn't.
Maybe, we get to go back again on our way back, but it's quite a long way between places here on the South Island, so we'll see.
Despite the weather though, we have really enjoyed Nelson and it is one of our favourite places we've seen in New Zealand and we are sad to be leaving tomorrow. We would have hoped to stay longer, but since there's no work for us here, we have to move on.
Up early tomorrow for a long drive down to Christchurch along the coast line!
Ta'ra!
Jenny and David
- comments
Singweland Could totally imagine Dave making those hand gestures. I find them really comical though. :P