The drive to Pelorus Bridge

The first night in a real bed after 10 days felt really nice, especially when you hear the storm outside. Unlimited hot water becomes a true treat. We had booked a dusk Dolphin encounter tour for 8:30 am that they had confirmed the day before. We woke up quite early to start cleaning up the back seats and properly assess the damages.

Half way through the cleaning up, we received a message from the tour saying that they are cancelling today, as even though the worst of the wind was gone, it was not safe to go out. 
Without this time deadline for the morning, we just simply took our time to properly get set up in the car, do a larger grocery supply run and visit the few outdoor, hunting or hardware stores in Kaikoura to find the few missing pieces that we needed to repair.

Once that was done, we bid Kaikoura goodbye for Blenheim. Stuart said that it was a where some of the best New-Zealand wines were produced. We hoped to find a good and sheltered picnic stop there to fix the tent out of the wind. Blenheim sits between two mountain ranges, it should be fairly protected.

Along the coast line, we stopped at a view point to discover a entire colony of seals was resting right below ! The coastline on that section is more of long black sand coves and bay. We also spotted a few surfers going for the waves.

As we neared Blenheim, the landscapes starts to change and gets also flatter. It’s vineyards and pastures everywhere and we start to recognize the names of the estate that we had tasted in the past.

In Blenheim we did another supply stop. We found some sunscreen, and some repair tape. I also found an optician to fix my sunglasses who broke early in the day. ( Kaikoura really didn’t like us ) .

Once all that was done, we when along the riverside and were lucky enough to find a sheltered pic nic table. It wasn’t as hard as we imagined, and we really did have all we needed with us. It took us 1h to fix the tent.

By that time, we were tired and needed to move on. So we started our drive to Pelorus Bridge Reserve, which is another 1h drive. Along the way we picked up a nice bottle of Warau river white wine. After yesterday, we definitely deserved a treat.

The DOC campsite at Pelorus Bridge is really nice. The campsite is really off the road, has great facilities AND is nestled along a transparent water river you can swim in. It has a few good trails with various difficulty starting right by it. Tomorrow we will walk a few before driving to Nelson.

We pitched the tent, and it stands great ! Let’s hope we have good weather conditions so we can keep it going until the end of the world tour. Lesson learned, always check the weather forecast ! ( and we need to learn how to better pitch and stabilize a tent ).