Despite the grey start to Friday (November 27th) when we were in Abel Tasman National Park, as we rounded Takaka Hill on the highway back to Motueka, breaks started to appear in the clouds and the sun occasionally peeked through. We did not regret leaving Totaranui Campground, however, because the strong northwesterly winds were still creating clouds over the Park’s mountains to the north of us. We stopped at the Hawkes Lookout for a good view towards Tasman Bay over the fertile Riwaka Valley and then again in Motueka for a brief stroll along the Estuary Walkway near the Motueka Sandspit Scenic Reserve.

South of Motueka we took the Ruby Bay Scenic Route, a coastal road passing through Mapua, a small community with several fine restaurants including one that rather inexplicably bragged about having tame eels. Once in Nelson (population 46,440), which is hailed a one of New Zealand’s most “livable” cities, we parked the van and wandered around the city center.

With cheerful flower-baskets hanging from the lampposts and shade provided by avenues of bright-green trees, we found it to be an attractive town. A quartet of lunch-pies later, however, we found one aspect of the city that did not quite appeal to us. Prominent on a hill at the head of Trafalgar Street is the art-deco Christ Church Cathedral, which has an intriguingly open-frame bell-tower but the dark grey stone of rest of the rather boxy building was, quite frankly, rather ugly. Luckily, hillside around the modern cathedral site was resplendent with an impressive collection of heritage trees, many of which had been planted around 1890.

Wandering past some handsome wooden buildings from the turn of the 20th century and through the peaceful Queens Gardens, we eventually found our way back to the van along a riverside walkway. With a Botanical Reserve and several other parks, we could easily have spent longer in Nelson but by now we felt a bit of a pull to get closer to Picton, the town from which Andrew and Judith would take the ferry to Wellington on Sunday.

With 30 knot-wind-driven waves splashing across the highway as we drove along the side of Tasman Bay, north of Nelson, we rejected the idea of staying at a campground on that exposed coast. I suggested a more sheltered looking site at Okiwi but after we had made the 21 km (13 mile) detour off the Picton highway, we discovered that there were no cabins available due to a weekend fishing tournament (good luck to them in that wind). The caravan offered instead was not appealing so the manager very kindly called the campground in the next main town, Havelock, to make a reservation for us there. Although the marina-side campground had a few basic cabins, Judith and Andrew investigated the nearby Havelock Garden Motel and, after the cramped night with four of us in the campervan, they understandably decided to treat themselves to the luxury of a very well appointed three-room suite.