{"id":792,"date":"2016-05-18T11:54:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T23:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=792"},"modified":"2016-05-30T17:36:28","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T05:36:28","slug":"nelson-with-occasional-motueka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=792","title":{"rendered":"Nelson, with Occasional Motueka"},"content":{"rendered":"

Out of\u00a0cleverness<\/em>, I put various TV shows on my phone, so that I could watch them if the scenery got dull.
\nIt didn’t, and indeed the road was sufficiently winding that looking out the windows was the only option; Nausea kicked in when I started reading something on my phone.<\/p>\n

The Picton to Nelson road passes through various tiny little places, including the entertainingly-named Canvastown, a former pop-up tent town of gold miners & those who sell to them. They’ve discovered lumber now, from the look of it.<\/p>\n

When I booked at Honeysuckle House\u00a0(by phone; I was getting a bit desperate, as I’d found a few ‘no room at the inn’ hostels, and I only booked it yesterday)<\/em> the proprietor had offered to get her husband to give me a lift if it was raining. Fortunately, it wasn’t and it was a pretty easy walk; Nelson’s not that big.
\nIt’s another town surrounded by hills, but I didn’t bother trying to capture it on-camera; The phone really isn’t up to the task.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0did<\/strong> cut through some gardens on my way to the hostel, …
\n\"IMG_20160516_112728105\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160517_094137482\"<\/a>
\n… and spotted an anachronistic-looking bridge\u2020, which I checked out later, when I didn’t have a pack on.<\/p>\n

Honeysuckle House<\/a> is quite a nice hostel, run on a gleefully ad-hoc honour system from what I can tell; I extended my stay after the first night, when I decided that I didn’t really want to lug all of my stuff to Motueka & find a place there, and then extended it again by a night so as to not have two wildly early nights in a row.\u2021
\nThrough all of that there was no thought of a deposit, or payment, and when I eventually tracked them down on my last day to settle up, they gave me a bit of a discount for having stayed so long.
\nIt’s your classic high-ceiling two-story place, where the downstairs is the hostel, and the upstairs is the owners. Maximum capacity of 8 people, with one double room, one twin, and one 4-bed dorm. For most of my stay there was Me & a young woman from Nanjing staying there, with a German woman one night, and a French one another night. Comfy place, well-heated, had a lounge that nobody but me used, fairly standard kitchen, and free ice-cream.<\/p>\n

\"that<\/a><\/p>\n

Dinner involved a trip back into town to find an Iskender Kebab; This is all the fault of\u00a0Cenk G\u00f6k\u00e7e, for having mentioned them in a Facebook post a few days earlier, and putting the idea in my head while I was in Picton, a town devoid of Kebab shops.
\nReally,\u00a0I’m<\/em> the victim here.
\nAlso, it was a really good dinner.<\/p>\n

Laundry happened, thanks to actual sunlight, and was the first official hostel laundry of the trip.
\nI’d hoped for fanfare, but what I got was clean dry clothes, so I’m OK with that.<\/p>\n

Wanderings through town demonstrated that Nelson has a\u00a0huge<\/strong> marina, through which I walked until I ran out of public access, and it was still going strong at that point,<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160513_114054584\"<\/a><\/p>\n

riverside cycle & walking paths with various art items,<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160513_120451245\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and the mural I’ve been using as my login image for the past few months.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_100643721\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Remember that bridge\u2020 I mentioned?<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160517_135128994\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It turns out to lead to, and is part of, the\u00a0Huangshi Chinese Garden<\/a>, which sits inside Queens Gardens, and is part of a Friendly City relationship.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_125546673\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_095901442\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_095922014\"<\/a>
\n<\/a> \"IMG_20160515_100104802\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_130514792\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_130552716\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_130636820\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m not sure whether it’s my favourite bit of Nelson, but it’s pretty close, and it was certainly a very nice place to pass through on my way to & from things.
\nAlso, the paving was interesting.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_125631294\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Part of The Nelson Experience involved a day trip to Motueka, to visit Cap’n Ghastly<\/del>\u00a0John, who I worked with back at Whitcoulls.
\nGetting there involved a fairly early bus, with an equally early arrival into a mostly-deserted town, which, while devoid of traffic and pedestrians, was\u00a0not<\/strong> devoid of class, as the Bacon & Eggs I had for breakfast came with broadleaf parsley & an artistic smear of pesto.<\/p>\n

I had time to kill before I felt comfortable taking the risk that people might be asleep, so I took a walk to the waterfront, to find … well, water. And a beach made mostly of rounded rocks. And quite a lot of view.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160514_094522385\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160514_102201813\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There was also the remains of a wharf, beside which were the remains of a ship.
\nI’m not sure whether they just parked it & walked away, letting nature take its course.\"IMG_20160514_101537347\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Caught up with John & nattered over cups of tea for 4 hours or so about, basically, what we’d be up to for the last decade.
\n(Incidentally, it seems to be a rare small town where the main drag isn’t “High Street”)<\/em><\/p>\n

Took the bus back, getting in after dark, had a go at photographing the quite bright moon, …<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_181441755\"<\/a><\/p>\n

… & watched a few episodes of Z Nation, which may not have been the wisest move.<\/p>\n

Yes, it got funny; Episode 3 has the Liberty Bell in it, which they use to good & hilarious effect.
\nBut Honeysuckle House is an old wooden building, and after watching three episodes, I was the last one awake, moving through a dark & mostly-empty house.<\/p>\n

Like I said, not my smartest move.<\/p>\n

\n

Some early-morning phone-bingling led to a conversation with Steven & Monica about the planned Great Road Trip from Chicago to Indianapolis in August, which helped to firm up some plans for me.<\/p>\n

Nelson is home to the Geographical Centre of New Zealand.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_121342426\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s the origin point for the District, which is in the centre of all of the districts – The Gravity-Model centre is sort of nearby, in an unremarkable patch of scrub.<\/em><\/p>\n

It was a nice day, so I walked up there.
\nThere was a lot of up involved.<\/p>\n

Nice views though.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_122832407\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_122842469\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And because I wanted proof that I’d made it to the top of the bloody hill,<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160515_121552115\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

My other reason for extending my stay\u2021 was because Gen Con events registration happens at 4am NZ time, on a Monday, and I didn’t really want to be having to get up early to catch a bus the morning after having gotten up\u00a0very<\/em> early to hit the ‘Go’ button on my events wishlist.<\/p>\n

I did some tweaking of that list the night before.
\nTried & failed to remember how to make Excel do a sheet with Day & Hour time entries, incrementing by the hour, and had already drawn up a rough calendar when I realised that I could just do it in my diary in pencil, which is what I did.
\nGot through priorities 1-19 before I got sick of it, & just filled the back end of the list with sessions of Numenera & Dr. Who.<\/p>\n

There’s a post in it’s own right about Gen Con Events Reg., so I’ll skip over that for now.<\/p>\n

\n

It absolutely pissed down in the afternoon; I did try to get a picture of the storm rolling in over the hills, but it’s … Not as ominous as it was in person.
\n\"IMG_20160516_113226953\"<\/a>\u00a0Fortunately, the ice-cream was topped up at mid-day, which made for a very pleasant day of doing very little.<\/p>\n

My last day in Nelson, having checked the weather reports, I took the hostel folks in Greymouth\u00a0(my next stop)<\/em> up on their offer of a pick-up from the bus station, through the wonders of email.
\nAlso booked a hotel for the arrival in the US; Hilton were doing a sale which happened to include something convenient, and it’s at a brand (Doubletree) which is known for it’s warm cookie at check-in policy, so that’s a plus.
\nI stayed at one in Dublin, back in 2014, which is why I’m a Hilton customer loyalty scheme member, not that I have any usefully accumulated points. The cookie there was pretty good, and very unexpected; Shall have to see whether I can get a jar of them for the road trip.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

My bus out of Nelson was at 0715h, so I packed up all of my stuff the night before, and even forewent a morning shower\u00a0(is ‘forewent’ a real word?)<\/em> to allow myself more sleeping time.
\nNaturally, I woke up before my alarm.\"all<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Out of\u00a0cleverness, I put various TV shows on my phone, so that I could watch them if the scenery got dull. It didn’t, and indeed the road was sufficiently winding that looking out the windows was the only option; Nausea kicked in when I started reading something on my phone. The Picton to Nelson road […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-can-be-fun-to-run-away"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-cM","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":872,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions\/872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}