On the road: Week eight round-up
Distance travelled: 578km (including the ferry trip) from Hastings to Motueka.
Audiobook on deck: Mistborn: Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson for the both of us and Kath is listening to The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler in her car. Still.
Currently watching: Fullmetal Alchemist - we are up to episode 30.
We were grateful for: Having swift and fairly simple solutions to the various issues (broken loo, broken fridge, melted inverter, broken freshwater tank) we have encountered over the pas couple of weeks.
We missed: Not having an inverter for a few days, which limited our camping options to places which offered a power hookup.
We learned: That literally everything that breaks on our European van that isn’t the engine will take three times as long to find parts for.
Funniest moment: We got two slices of multi-layered, multi-coloured cheesecake in honour of a family member’s heavenly birthday, and being super duper excited to eat it until we took a bite and it tasted like rubber.
Best save: Dan’s epic persistence in finding the right parts to fix the water tank and then doing it himself, saving us several hundred dollars of plumber/mechanic fees.
Best campsite: A night at Trout Hotel in Canvastown, offering $15 per night parking with power for NZMCA members. Super close to Pelorus Bridge swimming hole and the pub food was DIVINE.
Most interesting fact we learned: That a simple journey of 25 minutes can turn into a one-and-a-half-hour epic when you forget to account for long-weekend traffic all piling home!
We recommend: Supporting local retailers in our smaller towns, as they will consistently go the extra mile for you! Also, nine times out of 10, the customer service be WAY MORE friendly than those in larger centres.
Number of wrecked cars on the roadside: Three, and one sunk boat.
Progress made towards our 20 in 2020: A swim in the Pelorus River and staying a night in the Nelson region (actually harder than you might think as the region is NZ’s smallest and it’s easy to shoot through!). The only regions left to tick off are Taranaki and Northland.
