Sunday 18th February – Nelson Food and Wine Festival and moving on

We left the Edwards having packed all our belongings back into our camper and said goodbye to Eddie.  We followed them to Brightwater where the Nelson Food and Wine Festival was on from 11 to 5pm today.

There was a glorious blue sky and it was even warmer than yesterday.  We took our camping chairs and table in and set up with some shade, provided by an umbrella supplied by the Edwards:  

Simon's favourite meal - meat with some more meat

We did the ‘circuit’ to work out which stalls had the best-looking wares for us to sample in our complimentary plastic beer glass.  The issue today – Simon and I must leave Richmond behind us to make our way down the east coast due to another exciting ‘bookme.com’ event early tomorrow morning!  So, I was limited to one alcoholic beverage only.  This was helped due to the fact that we ran out of cash and the cash back system wouldn’t work for us.  We know that the Edwards would have been happy to keep buying us drinks and food all day but really, we have enjoyed their hospitality enough, we didn’t want to take the mick.  There was a great atmosphere there, with free water and sun cream in ready supply to help punters cope with the conditions.

Doing the tour - what a scorcher!

I think we found Simon's TVR!

The few hours passed by quickly.  We were entertained by a local infant school’s choir before a couple of bands and a dance troupe did their thing.  

It's okay, they're supposed to have blue mouths!

They teach the Haka here early...

Before we knew it, 3pm came around and we started collecting our things together and had to bid fond farewells to the Edwards.  They have been so welcoming, generous and helpful, and it has been a lovely break for us to be off the road staying in a beautiful house for a few days.

The satnav gave us an estimate of three and a half hours to reach our destination on the east coast, Kaikoura.  This area was hit with a severe earthquake in 2016 which destroyed large sections of the main highway from Blenheim to Kaikoura.  They are still working around the clock to repair the road system and we were lucky that Highway 1 re-opened in November 2017.  However, it still shuts overnight between 830pm and 7am, so that’s another reason we couldn’t hang around with our journey.  The drive was scenic but with few specific viewing points to slow us down.  We did get caught at several traffic lights for road works but there was a bonus to that – there were many seals relaxing on rocks and swimming in the sea for us to watch.

View down the coastline

Arriving in Kaikoura about 715pm we managed to get a camping spot before getting some fish and chips for dinner and watching the sunset – first from the beach before we found that our campsite had an even more spectacular view for us:

I'm not sure which of these is my favourite so I give you both....!