Windy Welly

After flying for about 25 hours Rosie arrived and met me in Melbourne. Where I was waiting after my overnight flight from Perth. We were both tired, but excited!

The flight to Wellington was pretty fast, it only took 2hrs 40 instead of 3hrs 30. The pilot said we had a 250km/hr tail wind! On the descent to Wellington we saw all the waves in Cook Strait... It looked ROUGH. Because of all the wind our landing was very bumpy, Rosie's stomach just about managed to hold on to the one piece of mushroom tortellini we had eaten as our plane breakfast!

At the airport we had to take the tent, shoes and dried beef to the biosecurity check. They accepted the tent and beef, but Rosie's shoes had to have an extra scrubbing before they were allowed into the country.
We had booked a shuttle bus straight to our hotel but we think we'd probably missed it due to the delay at quarantine. We wandered around confused for a while, pushing our giant trolley full of bags and freshly scrubbed shoes. Eventually we spotted another shuttle bus, probably the next one, and got on that. We don't really remember much about the ride to the hotel, Rosie says it was a Sunday night so the city was quiet, I pretty much just looked at the seat in front of me in a zombie-like state.
After checking in, we used a luggage trolley to transport all our bags to our room, had showers, tried out the teabag selection in the room and went to bed.  It was 6pm.

I was able to sleep most of the night but Rosie was on a 13hr time difference so struggled to sleep even though she was really tired.
Our first morning we were feeling weak after not eating much the night before. We put on our rain jackets and went out to find a supermarket just before the shops opened at 8am. We bought breakfast supplies and brought them back to the hotel. After a healthy breakfast (plus chocolate pastries) we felt much better so went on a walk down to the waterfront and then up to the botanic gardens. It was raining on and off but wasn't cold. We got pretty hot when walking up the steep hills to the botanic gardens.

Out on the rainy streets

Windy waterfront

Resting in the Rose Garden

Bit of a hilly walk!

Cable car down

 We spent a bit of time walking in the gardens and then took the cable car back down to the city. It probably would've been more sensible to take the cable car up and walk down, but our jet lag brains weren't working properly yet. It was lunchtime by now so we got foot long meatball subs and watched a bit of TV at the hotel.

In the afternoon the clouds had all blown away so we took another walk along the waterfront, this time in the opposite direction and then took a path up into the hills trying to get to the Mt Victoria lookout. We ended up on the wrong path and were getting quite tired by now, especially Rosie who hadn't slept very well, so we went back down and back to the city. We got a takeaway pizza and wedges for dinner and Ros went to sleep soon after. I managed to stay up until about 9pm.

Still windy!

Yum

 The next morning we were up early again. After breakfast we took a bus to the Otari Wilson's Bush reserve and did a few short walks. I wore my shorts and a t shirt after we were too hot yesterday, but we soon had to layer up to the rain jackets. We had a snack of leftover pizza at a picnic area in the park and then took the bus back to the city.
In the afternoon we had plans to visit the museum but ended up staying in our room resting and watching TV! We had to make the most of having a hotel room because tomorrow we'll be in the tent. In the evening we took a last walk along the waterfront and also walked to check out the location of the rental car place.

The shorts came out!