Thoughts from Wellington....

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Greetings everybody!

I am now in Wellington preparing to leave North Island behind and head south across the Cook Strait.

So what have been up to since my last update?
I didn't get to skydive in Taupo unfortunately as the weather was pretty much solid overcast. The weather forecast for the next day was pretty bad to so we cut our losses and left. A bit annoying as the previous few days had been all clear skies and sunshine but nevermind. Taupo was a pleasant town with a nice beach and some good walks in the vicinity.
After leaving Taupo we headed south to the Tongoriro National Park with the intention of doing the Tongoriro Crossing, a full day hike across volcanoes, lava flows, lakes and such like. It is supposed to be very good however the weather had something to say about that too. It rained pretty much all day and the weather was too bad to attempt it. With pretty much nothing else in the area we decided we didn't have time to wait around with no guarantee that we would be able to do it the next day so we moved on. We scratched off Mount Taranaki too as the weather was similar there and we didn't want to drive for 4 hours to get there only to discover we couldn't climb it because of the weather.
So with that we headed further south and after doing a few walks along the way ended up a place called Foxton Beach. It was a convenient stopping point and we got a good view of sunset on the beach.
Our next destination was a commuter town called Porirua that was to be our base for exporing Wellington. The place itself is quite nice and the start of the amusingly (to us anyway) named Colonial Knob Walk began right next to our campsite. After completing this walk we headed into Wellington for the afternoon. The city itself is a pretty nice place. It's fairly lively and has a good feel about it, it is however very windy. We climbed the nearby Mount Victoria to get some good night time views of the city. Today we've been doing some further exploring and as mentioned tomorrow we head for South Island.

Hope you are all well.
Mike x

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Photos

Rubbish Weather
Crap weather scuppers the Tongoriro Crossing.

Sundown
Sundown on Foxton Beach.

Colonial Knob
I really should grow up one day.

A view from the Knob
One of the views from the summit of the Colonial Knob walk.

The Beehive
The New Zealand parliment building. Odd

Wellington by night.
A night view of Wellington from Mt. Victoria.

Our van..
And because I've only just got round to taking one, our campervan.