Today started for most of us some time around 6:45-7am, because we needed to leave before 7:30am to get to Picton from Nelson by 9:30am to get the car returned ... This was before Decay double-checked our itinerary and discovered that we were due for boat-off at 10am, and not 10:30am ... Nevermind, we packed up, drove off, and had more windy roads (I wonder if there are more or less people who are motion sick living and travelling by road in New Zealand than in other less windy roaded places ....) ... Decay befriended a NZ local (well, the dude setting up for the Sunday Market in Nelson - in the carpark behind our motel) to ask how long it would take to travel to Picton, and which way would be best to tackle. Contrary to common logic, the longer way is the quicker way to go, which means the map is telling lies (: It would probably tell us more if it were topographical, but we get what we can with the free maps we pick up ...

Anyways ... we got to Picton ferry by 9:15am, dropped the car keys off, checked in, and discovered that the ferry problems they were having a few days ago actually did affect the ferry we were supposed to be travelling on, so instead of leaving at 10:30 for the three hour ferry across to Wellington, we were due to leave at 11:30 for the two hour ferry. Which left us PLENTY off time to sit around and ... play poker. *grin*

Lumpy interrupts this rantspace post to tell everyone that Outback Jack is called Miss Popularity... Although having just explained that M34tb4LL and I thought that Outback Jack involved the winning of some guy's hand at the end, whereas Miss Popularity involved the winning of Cash... he's not so sure anymore... maybe it's called Outback Gary ...

Anyway, we boarded, none of us got sick (w00t!), and the Lynx was stable enough for a Droidy to play gameboy and not get dizzy.

The finding of the Hotel was an interesting exercise in navigation. Sambo was explaining to us that quite a lot of places have been renamed with Maori names, so our first challenge was to work out what the street name was called on the two maps we managed to find. Having one of the maps a mirror image of the other was not quite the challenge we were looking for, but we got there in the end, checked in and Droidy noticed a Wireless Hotspot sign ... which explains the mass amount of posting happening today... (:

We Warthogged our way to Te Papa, and Grumbler sweet-talked his way into a free parking spot instead of the $2.50/hr we would've been up for at the Museum Carpark. Two hours of wandering around this place was not enough, but that's all the time we had, really... getting there at 4pm on Sunday was not quite what we had in mind, but picking up the second Warthog, and navigating around to our hotel kind of ate into our time... Ahh well... something to do more of next time (:

We're about to go off to grab some sort of dinnery stuff, down the road for some pub grub, it seems...