January 7th – When In Rome
A quick morning visit to Hastings the next town to look at cameras, mine is completely broken and we are down to our last one between us which is not brilliant at taking photos. Found one but unless you buy a camera from duty free it is not covered by the international warranty so that was the end of that. It’s so hard when you are living on a very strict baggage allowance to look round the shops and not buy anything. Even getting presents that will not cost a fortune to send is a challenge. We have bought patches from most places we have been to and also collected the little bags of sand but apart from that have been very controlled. Poor O is beside herself looking at the latest fashions but she is getting excited about going back to the UK and shopping “for real”.
I really wanted to visit a vineyard while we were in the Hawkes Bay area but there are so many it is hard to know what to do so we dropped in at the tourist office and decided on a tour of Church’s Vineyard. Our map reading skills let us down and we just missed one tour but it did give us a chance to have a snack in the fabulous restaurant and catch up on some postcard writing. The tour itself was very good and we saw the old and new machinery, the old concrete wine cellars and the smell was amazing. Little know fact – vineyards use about half “contracted” growers grapes, I don’t know why but I thought they always owned the vineyards. The science of putting the wines together was really interesting and of course I had to taste some very lovely wines to see what they were talking about. Again if we were only on holiday here I could have so easily bought a few bottles, they just slipped down so nicely. It was very hard to stop but I was driving so Josh made me spit them out. Looking forward to the wine region in Australia though.
We had rented a 4 person go-cart at the holiday park in the evening so the kids drove me round and we had fun looking at all the tents including a Harry Potter one with a very strange set up. It looked like a Bedouin tent, like one from the Quidditch World Cup. Some of the tents are huge – like 4 rooms and very impressive.
Tags: New Zealand, Travel
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