Thursday 12th November 2009 - Picton

We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful morning to wake up to in Hanmer Springs - absolutely perfect! Lindsay, Darryl and Karen left early as we had to catch the ferry today in order to get to Manfield for scrutineering on Friday. Everyone else has been convoying through to Kaikoura for lunch and working their way up to Picton for the night - we past John Baker who was picking up the tour from the Ward pub so it was great to see that people are still managing to catch part of the tour if they want.

Tomorrow is the show and shine in Wellington at the Ford dealer (from either 1pm or 3pm-Conrod will confirm for me soon) and the morning will be taken up with the crowd still in the south being on the ferry - our ferry trip has been nice and calm - hope it is for those guys too!

We've not stopped laughing along the whole tour and the event is only 5 1/2 days in - I think we will all have very sore head muscles and stomach muscles from laughing so much. We've only managed to annoy one neighbour at the holiday camps so far - we got told at 1.30am to shut up - so we all moved over to Pete & Lindsay's room for an extra hour - Pete was not originally with us but he received a lovely wake up call! There were others there under camouflage but we can't mention names at this stage!

More later.....
Updated:
I understand it took about 8 hours to get from Hanmer Springs to Picton for the others - no there were no breakdowns just lots of sightseeing/socialising breaks. Lunch at Kaikoura followed by afternoon tea at the Ward pub/cafe, then another break at Blenheim for some to update their rubber collection - yeah well i guess you had to be there for that one. And from all accounts it was an early night!

For Darryl, Lindsay and I the dramas continued, the ferry was about an 40 mins late docking so we were running late and poor Lyndsay had to leg it off the ferry only to find that Conrod was waiting for him at the getting on end of the Bluebridge dock (about a kilometer away), so we delivered his bags to Conrod and text Lindsay to stay by the lights - he didn't know what we were doing when we took off with his bags! Then we were running late to drop Beryl (The Gnome's mother) off at the airport - don't worry we made sure we got her there on time! We also had relatively early nights. Only 6 days in and absolutely shattered (happily though)!