Motueka to Nelson

This day was Alyssa’s turn to do her activity of choice, lucky for her I made a great designated driver because she decided a wine tour was a must do while in New Zealand. Unfortunately with it being early spring, it wasn’t the best time for visiting vineyards but they did have tastings. So along the way as we drove from Motueka to Nelson we stopped at a few different vineyards, what better way to start the day with a 10 am wine tasting, well I mean I can think of a few better ways but I see where they are coming from.  So as we went from vineyard to vineyard the hosts told all about the different wines and how they are made, so I probably know more about wine then most people I know that drink it. It really is quite an interesting process and they do a lot of different things to get the different flavours. So it was a pretty interesting day even while being alcohol free. I did get some pretty tasty grape juice at one stop though. We took a break and went to Mapua, a cute little habourtown. Along the Nelson region, where we were, they are famous for their real fruit ice cream so I got a ice cream cone of it and it was super delicious, although when it comes to ice cream I am not the hardest person to please, but this stuff was good! After a couple more tours we stopped in Richmond at the mall to take a little break and grab some lunch. Josh and I didn’t want to get the fast food at the mall so we went next door and found some pretty tasty looking lunch boxes next door at Pak’n’Save my favourite grocery store. Then it was back to the wineries.  We hit one more before heading to our final town, Nelson. Nelson is a larger city so we spent the evening walking around and checking out the city. My favourite place was a park with a larger cathedral up on top of a hill. It was beautiful. There are really great cathedrals all over this country as missionaries were some of the first people to come to New Zealand to try and settle it so I have really enjoyed seeing the architecture that goes into each of them.

It finally got dark so there wasn’t too much left to see and we decided to go out to dinner as we were in a really city finally and we hadn’t had a chance to eat out in awhile. So we decided on Indian food because it is so good here. I never had a lot back in the states so I really enjoy trying the new things and am learning a lot about the different foods people on this half of the world eat. I got a sort of sampler plate so I could try a few different things and it was pretty tasty.

The weekday nights are pretty low key as could be expected so that evening we decided to finish off our LOTR and watched the Return of the King. We barely made it to the end as that movie is so long and for me personally, I was getting pretty tired with so much travelling. But we watched it and pretty must had to resist pointing at every outdoor scene and saying where we saw that or where it looked like it was filmed compared to where we had been.

Pretending to eat a taco...I miss mexican food!

Lunch boxes!

Vineyard

Nelson Cathedral

Inside cathedral

Crazy as tree!

Wine tour!