If The (Wellington) Boot Fits

No rangers had passed by our little campsite. No other campers either. We were truly alone in this little DOC, far away from anyone. Well, that’s what I was philosophising until a big truck drove by on the road just over the river. Oh well, back to civilisation I guess. But not until we had made full use of the facilities. There were separate toilets plus shower for men and women and without realising that I could capitalise on the opportunity to use the womens for once in my life (as we all know they are pristinely clean with gold taps and pot pouri all over the place) without getting into trouble. I had lugged all my stuff into the mens shower cubicle and was almost ready to dive under when I realised that I had very nearly made the exact same mistake that I had done a week earlier. No towel. I quickly legged it back to the Hi-Ace and then jumped under the incredibly disappointing trickle that was supposed to be the shower. It was only afterwards that James advised me that the womens one was fairly decent, but by then it was already too late.

Morning, at our "camp site"

We arrived in Wellington just before lunch knowing that we would need to use some free Wi-Fi we dispensed with making sandwiches (again) in the knowledge that we would be needing another Maccy D’s in the city centre. Our first port of call was PB Technologies, a computer shop in Wellington who should have the internal hard drive we needed for our poorly netbook. Thankfully they had what we needed and although he quoted an extortionate amount for a memory upgrade we made the deal and left with a smile on our faces. We were nearly at netbook each stage, but we would need to go through the pain of installing everything back onto the original netbook. Malcolm had said this would take 4 days, but we got the feeling that he liked to over-exaggerate everything so we reckoned we would give it a go ourselves and hope for the best. We would be needing the Wi-Fi to book our ferry for the following day and also to install a load of updates onto LAPPY 2 as we didn’t want to use up our entire usage allowance from the next campsite on doing so and then not being able to do the important stuff like upload blogs and create the Fantasy Football team. It was then that we realised that we had minimal charge left on said netbook and we had naively left the power leads back in the campervan. In the end it didn’t even matter as when we tried to boot up in Burger King it wouldn’t even load Windows. Gah! Just when you think you have fixed one problem another one presents itself and grins smugly in your face.

Beautiful Wellington

 There was still time to see a few things in Wellington before leaving for the evening, so we went to the National Museum Of New Zealand for a spot of “culchuh”. We weren’t entirely sure what was in there but it was free admittance so we filled our boots. It was very heavily focussed on New Zealand (wait for it) and how it was formed and the geological processes that are still at work today. It felt like being back at King George V college back in Southport with Mr Clowes blabbering on about orogenisis and continental drift. Interesting stuff though. There were also sections on Maori culture and “before and after” the European settlers came to the country. But time was against us as we needed to try and get to a campsite in good time so that we could book ourselves onto the ferry to Picton the next day. We also wanted to see the cable cars that dominated the west part of the city as it was almost as hilly as San Francisco. We found the main one that was open to the public and had just missed it. It was due to make the return journey in 10 minutes but as it was $3.50 to ride it one way and that it would take us away from where we needed to get to, we just looked at it for a while and then turned on our heels and set off for the campervan.

Waiting and waiting...

By the time we had arrived at the campsite it was late and night had just fallen. We had no idea how good the facilities would be in that place but we parked up and James beetled out to the office to check in. The Jason’s Campsite “bible” said that it was cheap, at $25 for the two of us, which we were fine with, but it had no mention of Wi-Fi, which we would need to try and restore the broken netbook. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that we could use Colin’s (the owner) phone to call and book the ferry, the bad news was there was no internet at all. Colin explained that they normally cater for groups of kids or sporting events and the parents/teachers don’t want the kids to be on their phones on Facespace or Mytube or whatever it is that kids look at these days. So long as we booked the ferry we would be alright so a quick call to Bluebridge later we were set for the 13:30 the next day. We got dinner on the go (James – Pasta ‘n’ Sauce; me – sausage sandwich) and even though Colin listed a No Alcohol Policy in the rules and regulations for the site, I cracked open a nice tin of Haäaen lager. I say a “nice tin”, but it was pretty ropey, kind of like the stuff my dad used to but before he started buying branded lagers. So that’s why it was cheap. Relatively speaking. Booze seems to be pretty expensive over here and the best deal we have found has been on the Two Oceans boxes of wine. Everything else is ludicrously high. We managed to get LAPPY 2 back online after she “black screened” on us, and somehow got windows back on the original netbook, although the next problem was that the battery was not being recognised by the netbook. Jeez! Any more problems we can encounter with this thing?! That job would have to be for tomorrow, for the time was approaching to get the cards out and try and unify the belts.