The trip to the North
It has arrived the day we had to leave Middle Earth and say goodbye to all the Hobbits, grateful that we had escaped the evil Auks and had not had too much trouble with Sauron.
The campsite in Picton is one of the best we have stayed at, lots of space and really good facilities.
We were up fairly early and finished the last bits of packing. The master packer had been busy the night before and had put most of the stuff in the suitcases, rather reluctantly I felt. Neither of us really wanted to part from Vanessa.
We had emptied the dirty water tank the night before and what was left was last minute cleaning and tidying, as well as throwing away all of the brochures we had picked up on our travels.
We gave one of our camping neighbours supplies we didn't want to carry and they were very grateful for what in effect was four toilet rolls and half a  kitchen roll.
On the way out of the campsite we asked our neighbour to take a photograph of us with Vanessa just so that we would never forget.
We drove to the van hire depot and on the way filled Vanessa with Deisel. The lady at the office was charming and told us that very few vans were returned as clean and tidy as ours and then having completed the dreaded paper work we were off to the ferry port in the hire company's courtesy van.
In the queue for the ferry, still the same old Pride of Cherbourg,we stood next to an American couple who seemed to be carrying an old 78 rpm record player. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I asked then if that was waht it was. It was indeed a portable wind up 78 rpm record player which they had purchased in a second hand store along with 12, 78 records.
This led to an interesting discussion and it turned out that he was a teacher and she was a social worker. They stayed with us for the whole voyage and he was very interested in my personal history and the talks I had given in Hobart and the one I was about to give in Wellington.
Imagine my surprise when during a lull in the conversation he opened the record player and wound it up and played one of the records. This made everyone around us turn to look and turned out to be one of the most surreal moment sof the trip , two people from Cornwall ,two from Longbeach California listening to a yodelling country and western record recorded in New Zealand in the the 1930's or 1940's no wonder everyone around us stopped and looked at what was going on.
The journey across the Cook Strait was windy but smooth and made all that bit faster by talking to interesting and interested people.
At the end of the ferry journey we had just enough time to catch a taxi to our hotel to have a shower and a cup of coffee before John came to pick us up to the us to the talk venue. This was a little strange, as I had never expected to be speaking in New Zealand, and my view was that John had been very brave to try and organise something in such a short space of time. This and the fact I hadn't seen my notes for three weeks , made me rather nervous,however, the talk went really well, I think, and so does my manager, about twenty five people turned up and we had a good hour and a half.
It must have been firmly alright because they have invited me back to talk again, if and when we return to New Zealand.
After the talk we had a walk around the harbour with John and Li his partner, before going for a pub meal with Mark as other historian joining us.
After the meal John and Li took us back to our hotel via the summit of Mount Wellington so that we could look at the city in all of its night time glory. It was a magnificent view on a very windless night which apparently is an oddity for Wellington which is known as the Windy City.
An interesting day and one that we both thoroughly enjoyed.