Wellington

So we had to go through Wellington as it was our port to catch the ferry to the South Island. Have I mentioned that I love New Zealand’s choice of names? Could have been some long-winded hard to pronounce names, but nope… North and South. I love it. Anyway during our trip planning, I voted for spending an entire day in Wellington instead of just rushing through just to get to the ferry. When we woke up for our day in the city it was overcast, rainy, and windy. To add to that Melanie and Emma (who have gone tropo) were also freezing. So we opted for a day at the NZ national museum. It was a really well presented museum and I think we all had our distinct favorites. Melanie seemed to enjoy the scale Maori houses and Emma really enjoyed the kids’ natural history room. Mine was the x-ray room. This was a big room filled with marine mammal skeletons.

Being in a big city we decided to enjoy eating out at a nice restaurant or quite frankly anything that we couldn’t find in Samoa. In the end we came upon the Dixon Street Deli. It wasn’t in any of the tourist guidebooks, we just happened upon it. Delicious. I will say it again, delicious. I would go to Wellington again just to eat there, and it was cheap.

After lunch we headed out for the Wellington Botanical Gardens. Emma (and Melanie) was really excited because we got to ride an historic cable car to the top of the hill to get there. It was still rainy, but we had a nice time walking along the trails. It is rather like New York’s Central Park, just a big forest in the middle of the city. Emma even got to play on another wonderful playground. Toward the end we found the “duck pond”. Given that it was a city park and not the wilderness, we fed the animals. Yup, I took a luna bar out of my pocket and we fed it to the random park creatures. Given their obvious size (biggest mallard I have seen), this was not an unusual event for these animals and Emma was really excited to feed the birds out of her hand. They did not want to see us go (watch the video sometime, it’s funny).

The next morning, at the crack of dawn, we headed to the ferry which turns out is big enough to have a movie theater and a 3-story indoor playground. Emma as usual quickly met some other kids and played the entire 4 hour crossing to Picton. Passing through the islands of Marlborough Sound was quite beautiful and may have made up for the fact the Melanie had to be on a ship for 4 hours.