Day 19: Blenheim - Hanmer Springs

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Day 19 – Friday the 1st of April

Pinch and a punch for the first of the month! And no returns!

Sadly today we had to leave wine country, but not without a few more sips of wine.

Hello Allan Scott! The Sauv was ok but nothing wow until we tried one of their single vineyard sauvs......yum! A bottle of that and we’ll take the bubbles too and off we set with more bottles of wine and us still trying to figure out how we were to ship it all home. No way were we going to pay for excess baggage. We’d only collected about a case and a half so far to try and send back.

We could not come all this way and NOT stop at Saint Clair our favourite Sauvignon Blanc winery, that we got Nick and V hooked on too. This made the perfect place to stop and share a bottle of wine over lunch. We tasted their bubbles, Merlot and even single vineyard sauvs and we left with more than one bottle of all. They were so lovely and even offered to ship all our other bottles home for us two. We packed up 2 cases of wine and left for one more vineyard stop before we got on the road for Hanmer.

We had been told you cannot come to wine country without stopping at Seresin. Apparently it’s the only wholly organic winery in Marlborough. Organic seemed to be the way all the vineyards were heading with us trying at least one at most of the tastings we stopped at. The place was funky. The offices and cellar door where built from containers ships. The wines were yummy and very new agey but we had no way of getting anymore wine home or we really would be overweight so we took their card and made note of the ones we particularly liked.

Hanmer Springs was now our next destination. We called ahead and booked a site for 2 nights. We figured we’d have a bit of luxury for the last 2 nights and get a powered site. The drive was longer than we anticipated, just over 4 hours and we made it in to the camp ground at about quarter to 7pm. We filled up on water and emptied the toilet and waste, our camper duties.

We thought we’d better cook up what was left in the camper as tomorrow night we were planning on a nice dinner out before we have to head back to reality.

A few wines with dinner and off to bed we went for a day of total relaxation tomorrow.

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