Wellington

Day 1 – Hello Wello

Getting up at a fairly decent hour and having a free breakfast in the OAP dining room, we then headed off for a 2-3 hour drive down to Wellington.  The scenery along the way was stunning, weaving our way through lush green mountains and the odd waterfall dotted along the way, it was so pretty we had to stop a few times to take some pictures, but they don’t come any way near to doing it any justice, we’ve given up now and just appreciate them with our eyes.

Arriving in Wellington, after going round in a loop a couple of time we found our hotel, the receptionist was pretty miserable and wouldn’t let us check in until 2pm.  We paid for the parking (yes, charged for a hotel parking space!!) and then headed off to Cuba Street which is pretty bohemian street with lots of bars and restaurants.

Thinking we deserved a pint whilst we waited, we found a nice bar named ‘Bad Grannies’ and had a couple of craft beers before heading back to the hotel to check-in where we went to our room for a homemade sandwich and a nap.

As it was a Saturday night in New Zealand’s Capital, we thought we should have a night out. We started at the bar we went to previously and noticed they had Karaoke… yes you know what’s coming!

Not having enough to drink (yet) I declined Shell’s encouragement to get up, we were joined by a Kiwi guy who started chatting to us and it turned out he was a pretty avid Karaoke fan.  He got up and started chatting to the punters before doing very lively and entertaining number, although not pitch perfect.

A few more pints later and I was up there giving Wellington a rendition of ‘White Wedding’ followed a bit later on by Creed’s ‘Arm’s Wide Open’ (possibly not such a good idea!!).  We were also joined by Kiwi guys mate who was of Indian decent and fancied himself as a bit of a musical figure,  to be honest he had a good voice and I was impressed when he did Fiddler on the Roof’s ‘If I was a Rich Man’, doing it absolutely spot on!

It was now getting late on and I wanted to check out the Rock Bar next door, with a name like ‘Valhalla’ I was expecting good things.  However when we got to the door there was a band playing and they wanted a $10 dollar entrance fee, which after a bit of umming and ahhing I took the executive decision to pay.

Things looked pretty good and we got some drinks and started to watch the band, but the band were playing their last number by then.  Hoping there would be another band afterwards we waited around, but the bar started clearing out, so we were a bit pissed off for being mugged for $10 for one song and left the place.

As the bar next door was still going strong we popped back in there and had a couple more drinks before staggering back to the hotel for the night.

Day 2 – Ouch!

Ouch our heads hurt this morning. You would think that after 11 months we would be invincible but no, we both woke up feeling like we wanted to die. Me more so than Glenn for some reason, I think I must have been served my beer in a dirty glass. That and the fact that all we had eaten the previous day was a toastie made from the stale ends of our leftover bread.

Our usual city walking tour option was out because as in Auckland, they were stopped for the winter, so as the weather was pretty miserable we headed for the Wellington Museum.

First though we had to get some food so we headed for Fidel’s in Cuba street which had a pretty good write up. It was certainly popular as the queues were outside the door (last thing you need with a hangover). But we were quickly seated and tucking into a delicious b/f.

Next the Museum, it was pretty interesting (I think) and free, but required a lot of reading of text. I lasted about 15mins before my head started swimming and I gave up and found somewhere to sit, letting Glenn explore on his own. When he found me I politely but assertively informed him that I would die on the spot unless I was taken back to the hotel.

We were due to meet up with Glenn’s friend Sam for the evening. I was quite looking forward to it as I had met Sam previously and knew he would be great company. But knowing I wouldn’t be good company, I opted for a night in and let Glenn go out with his mate without my hangover dragging us down.

We popped out for a quick bite of something cheap and unhealthy and then Glenn went off to meet Sam. I spent the night catching up on cold feet (has Nesbitt dyed his eyebrows?) and drinking herbal Tea (I was in heaven). Glenn spent the night downing a few local brews and having a really great night catching up with Sam.

It was great to catch up with Sam, although I did not realise it had been 6 years since he had moved to NZ.  We met in a bar just off of Cuba Street and sunk a few pints of craft beer whilst chin wagging, eventually getting round to the sorry subject of football which both of us were suffering from at the moment Sam (Aston Villla’s demise), me (West Ham’s crap start to the season).

Sam had to go to work the next day so we couldn’t make a full session of it, but I managed to keep him out to 10.30 before heading back to the hotel for the night.

Day 3 - Happy Birthday to Shel

It was always going to be a tall order topping the volcano trip of my birthday…….

So I had thought we would go and visit to Weta Cave for Shell’s birthday, which is home to the company responsible for the Lord of the Rings tribology and many other block buster films.

On arrival we found that we could not get on the studio tour for about an hour and a half so did our best to eek out the time looking around their shop and character sculptures.  We then went out to their front garden where we took some pics with the resident Rock Troll’s.

We then watched a little intro film in a small theatre that showed clips of all the films they had been involved with as well as how some of the special effects had been created, after this we killed a bit more time before the tour started.

Not sure why it is called Weta Cave as it  was just a large workshop and we were led around it being shown various props from the films they had  been involved in (no photo’s allowed), and handed around items such as chainmail and space guns for us to experience.

To be honest although it was fairly interesting (or very interesting if you were the geek on our tour asking all the questions and who had actually tried to make his own chainmail!!!), it was pretty short and we did not see any animatronics we were expecting.   Sorry Shell, couldn’t quite top volcanoes.

After the tour we went outside and the weather was still pretty poor and after checking up on Lord of the Rings locations and judging that Helm’s Deep would be little more than a quarry site (Beefed up on screen by digital magic!), we thought we would just go for a little drive.

The drive was pretty short and the only thing of note that we visited was the NZ parliament buildings (The Beehive) before heading back to the hotel for the afternoon.

In the evening we headed out to celebrate Shell’s birthday proper, first of all downing a few pints in our pubs of choice, Bad Grannies, before heading over to an Argentinian restaurant across the road.

As it was a special occasion and we had been living off home cooked meals and junk food so far in NZ we ordered ourselves a nice sirloin steak each and a bottle of Malbec.  In all honesty it was pretty good, even having the Chimichurri sauce for the steaks so Shell’s birthday wasn’t a complete fail!

Once full up and sufficiently inebriated we headed back to the hotel for the night, although Shell announced that I would have to  be very nice to her tomorrow as it was still her birthday in blighty being 12 hours behind!!