Morning came quite slowly for me on the 5th day, I hardly got to sleep at all, the sounds of the city keeping my sleep disjointed at best. Casey, used to sleeping on ships, had no trouble sleeping through the noise and woke up feeling much like his old self, which was a relief, because now I was a grump from no sleep, so one of needed to be functional.
We did t really bother with breakfast, but made a quick potty stop, and headed for the ferry. We figured even though we had a reservation, with the cancellations, it would probably be busy and we should get there early. This proved mostly true, and we queued up with loads of other campers, cars, and commercial trucks to wait our turn to load. It was proving to be a beautiful day, and the sunrise made a beautiful show over the harbor and the ferry. We loaded up quickly enough and being a recovering Sickey and a no sleep wonder, we opted to nap it out in the van for most of the crossing. This ended up working out lovely, with the ship motion making it easy to drift off to sleep. Unfortunately, that motion also made many car alarms sound, and the nap was punctuated by endless horns echoing off the car-hold's metal walls. After about 2 hours or so Casey decided to hit the bathroom, and headed up, saying he'd be back shortly. Well, I fell back asleep, and woke back up, unsure of the time that had passed. Casey was still gone, so I figured I'd only just dozed for a minute. I decided now was as good a time as any to get up and wait for Casey to get back so we could go to the upper decks and enjoy the ride in to Picton. After about 10 minutes of waiting, I started to get concerned, but just then Casey came back, asking "did you miss me?". I said, of course, why wouldn't I? And he explained that he'd been gone for nearly 45 minutes, because the car hold doors were locked and we weren't supposed to be down there and he convinced a trash man to let him back in, because his wife was sleeping in the car. Oops! Guess I dozed longer than I thought. Since we weren't supposed to be there we thought it best to enjoy the rest of the journey from the top decks, which really was quite lovely. The ferry was quite easily maneuvering between huge rocky islands and sharp bends and shallows. It was a totally gorgeous day, too, so things really were on the up-and-up.
Once the ferry docked and everyone disembarked we decided to just high-tail it out of Picton and try to make up some time. Lucky for me, Casey is a super-awesome navigator/planner and he rigged up a delightful route for us. We had had something entirely different planned originally, but the weather and sickness delays have given cause to rework most of the rest of our trip, so from here on out we are planning day by day.
This particular plan made lots of time to bop around the Marlborough wine region! Yay! We were able to hit 3 wineries and a brewery in about 2 hours, so we not only maximized our time. We also bought yummy wines to gift to our many, many friends who have helped us make this logistical nightmare of a PCS/vacation possible (shout outs to: Jenna, Kathryn, Mark, Jessica, and all the others who were on stand by, just in case). OK, back to the trip.
So we tasted some great wines, and the weather was amazing still so the wineries were all open to their beautiful outside sitting areas. Absolutely lovely. Plus we got to taste lots of fun wines. We definitely though Cloudy Bay was the better of the places we went that day, and their gardens were the prettiest, too! But, sadly all the re-planning in the world couldn't give us our two lost days back, so we had to be on our way, we were shooting for Punakaiki by the evening, hopefully with sightseeing time to boot.
Happily, the driving was easy, the weather grand, and the company in good health. All in all this has been a great day so far! The remainder of the day we tried to make up some time and drove out to the west coast and made for Punakaiki. The way there was mostly farms again. But they were dotted with rolling hills along the way. When we started nearing the coast the rolling hills turned into much larger mountain-y areas, with sharp downhills and beautiful vistas. Much more exciting driving than flat farms as far as you can see. But, the cool thing is, even when the farms seem to go forever, you can never really be sure what the road will be like just a few miles ahead. Definitely part of the enjoyment of the whole experience lies in that itself.
When it just started to darken, but still with about an hour of twilight left, we made it to our camping spot for the night. Since we only had a short amount of light left we decided not to set up camp,but to go exploring instead. We were just a short walk from what are known as the pancake rocks, and just a few steps from the beach. So we headed up the hill to the cliffs. Casey spotted a sign on the way that said "Punakaiki Caves", so naturally he had to go exploring, but no worries, he had his new head lamp in his pocket, so all was well. It was completely dark in there, so other than Casey's lamp i just kind of felt my way around, even though Casey tried to hide in the dark and scare me, booger. There are a few fun pics in Casey's FB album from this adventure, so look forward to those. I will post a link to all the pics when I get the chance.
We made it out of the side adventure with still enough time to see the rocks before all the light was gone. It turned out to be really neat. The rocks have these very thin, distinct layers, that are very easily eroded by the waves, so they have turned into all thee crazy formations, including a natural bridge, and some very cool blow-holes. We weren't able to catch any of the sea spray at the time we were there, but it was cool all the same. This was certainly another high point in our already lovely day! We enjoy a beautiful walk back in the dark along the beach trail that led back to the camp. I made some yummy soup and had bread and cheese for dinner, with apples, and Casey just had the bread and apples, as his tummy was taking baby steps getting back to full-normalcy. All in all, great day! Hooray!
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