Day 10, National Park to Wellington

The day awakened slowly as did my knees. Another Motrin! It was overcast and the clouds were fairly low and you could only see the lower third of the three volcanoes. Both Mary and I commented on how lucky we were to have had the picture perfect day on our crossing. We headed out of town without breakfast and stopped at a petrol station to post some postcards home. Thirty kms down the rode we stopped in a small town for muffins and of course two flat whites. Flat whites are the crack cocaine of the coffee world; we are constantly searching for café’s that serve them. Mount Ruapehu finally faded from our view over our left shoulders as we headed south to Wellington. Mary took over the wheel of our Mitsubishi Lancer and we continued south. I will be perfectly honest here and say that I am not a good passenger sitting in the left seat of a right hand driven car. After several shrieks of terror and general uncomfortableness I settled in for a hour or so. Mary became increasingly agitated at me and finally as we approached Wellington she said she had had enough of my back seat driving and handed me the keys! We landed in the center of Wellington the capital of NZ right at lunch and were faced with a myriad of one way streets and of course the typical NZ road signs that tell you where to go at the last possible moment causing you to miss at least half the turnoffs as you can not conceivably make the turn in heavy traffic. We finally found an I-site and found parking fairly close by. We discovered that there were hardly any rooms available in the region as the International World Rugby 7”s tournament was in town. After checking half a dozen B&B’s as well as hotels we settled on the Bay Plaza on Oriental Parade Street. $152.00 a night for average accommodation. Mary and I were getting a little testy with one another at this point and we returned to the car to be stuck in traffic for about 45 minutes while the Rugby parade blocked all the downtown streets solidly. I was lucky enough to see the Canadian Team pass by and shouted my support. It was a pretty lonely voice amongst the crowd that was present. We finally found our hotel and carried all our gear in and headed out to Te Papa, which is the national museum of NZ. It is a beautifully laid out building with great exhibits of Maori artifacts and historical information. After spending a few hours inside we headed out into a light drizzle and came upon a small Italian restaurant and entered for some pasta. They said that there were booked but could find us a place near the back and we had a good feed of Spaghetti. I must say that the service could be described as poor at best. It is about the only time that leaving no tip was the proper thing to do. The service levels generally in NZ have been below our expectations and coming from Canada where we are not known for great service to begin with. We called it a early night and were asleep by 11 after trying to catch up on emails and updating the blog.