Days 24–25: Wellington to Nelson
A dead battery in a McDonald’s carpark, no spaces to camp, and curling up in a motion-sickness-induced ball on the ferry
I know, I know. I said in the last post that I wasn’t going to write about our brief passage through Wellington, but too much happened for me not to write about it. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.
Basically, the subheading should actually be Dan is an eejit. Here’s why…
Whilst we spent a good chunk of time in Macca’s doing travel planning and blog writing, I had left the headlights on in the van. Suffice to say, this was bad.
Ironically, one of the things we did during this time was book our ferry ticket across the Cook Strait to the South Island, and in a very brazen move, I said something along the lines of, “Well, now we just need to hope nothing goes wrong with the van to make us miss it!” Lo and behold, the van didn’t start. Fortunately, this is what an AA membership is good for, and forty minutes later we were up and running again.
In my defence, the van is so old that the dashboard gives no indication during the daytime that the lights are on so it’s very easy to forget. But, I am still an eejit. On the bright side, during this delay, we had Domino’s for dinner again. Hooray!
From there, we briefly visited our old flatmates — Sam and Marijon — as we had left a few things behind that we needed to pick up — cough, Anna’s hiking shoes, cough! They showed us around their new place — which was really nice — and they even gave us some of their amazing home-made pakoras. They went down a treat so thank you very much, guys!
We then made use of the hot tub and showers at the pool before making our way to the campsite. Unfortunately, it was very late by the time we arrived, and there were no spaces left. Given that there were no other campsites nearby — it is the capital city after all — we took a risk and parked in a dubiously marked disabled space. Again, in our defence, it wasn’t clear if this was allowed or not because it was in the area marked for overnight campers, but we were definitely crossing our fingers and toes in the hope that we wouldn’t wake up to a $200 fine.
As well as having that risk, it also meant that we were blocking in another couple — who weren’t parked in an actual space anyway — and they were getting an even earlier ferry than we were. We agreed that they would wake me up at 4:30am so that I could let them out. Ouch!
Four thirty came around and I initially panicked in my half-asleep state as I immediately thought that the banging on the van was an officer waking us up to lump us with a hefty fine. After a moment or two, the panic subsided as I remembered the plan from the night before and sleepily reversed the van out.
It wasn’t long after that that we were getting up ourselves as we had to check-in for the ferry at seven.
It’d be nice to write that the crossing went smoothly, but it didn’t. While the seas weren’t that rough, they weren’t exactly flat either. In yet another smart move, I managed to completely forget to buy any travel sickness tablets.
The trip out of the harbour went well, but as soon as we hit the open ocean — and people were starting to walk along the corridors in zig-zags rather than straight lines — things took a turn for the worse. I ended up spending the majority of the journey restlessly sleeping, curled up in the foetal position. Anna kindly told me that I looked "pretty bad". I lasted the three and a half hours and made it across without puking, but as anyone who suffers from motion sickness knows, it wasn’t fun.
I’m sure Anna would want me to mention that she found the crossing very pleasant as she sipped her Earl Grey tea.
After docking in Picton — and sacrificing a block of tofu as thanks to Poseidon for sparing me — we hit the road once more with Nelson as our destination.
