New Zealand Day 4

Tuesday, Dec. 17th

Tongariro to Picton

We had an early start. Packed up our campsite, ate breakfast, and headed out of the park for Wellington.

On our drive south we stopped in Whanganui because there was a really cool playground/park that we had to investigate. New Zealand seriously has the BEST playgrounds in the world! The tree house was pretty stinking neat!

The highway finally rejoined with HWY 1 and it took us to Wellington.

We had several hours down time before we had to catch our ferry to the South Island. So we walked around the city center, got lunch at this place called Burrito King (we were curious about what Kiwi's though Mexican food tasted like). Then we went for a ride on the Trolley up to the Wellington Botanical Gardens. Took a walk around the gardens for a while, then caught the trolley back down the hill.

The ferry ride we had signed up for over 6 months before our trip (with our car rental) was supposed to be at 2:30pm, but here is when the problem happened. When we got to the check in for the boat they told us that our ride was supposed to be at 9:30am earlier that morning.... We were very unhappy and frustrated with this news. We were never informed that the time had changed on us. They never sent us a time change or confirmation for any time other then the 2:30 time we set up. One would think that if they had to change the time or give us a different time, that they would have given us a later ferry, not moved the time up on us by 5 hours. People plan these trips so far in advance and with such little wiggle room with time that they should think about this. Even when we picked up the car in the first place, they should have checked with us to make sure we saw what times they had us down for. (We spent many hours of our trip fuming about it, talking it out and talking on the phone with the rental agency). What it came down to was that we had to pay for a whole other set of tickets on top of the two rides we had already paid for. They wouldn't pay us back and weren't a bit reasonable with us.

Finally, after paying for the extra tickets we shouldn't have had to pay for and an extra 5 hour wait in Wellington we weren't planning on (which we spent walking around the Te Papa museum), we hopped on the car ferry down to Picton.

Arriving super late (after midnight), we found the camp ground (Picton Top 10 Hiliday Park) and checked into our cabin.

I can't even remember what we ended up doing for dinner that night, as we had just dealt with a ton of craziness with the ferry time change.