Woke early in Napier for the long trip to Wellington, necessary as we are catching the ferry to the south island tomorrow (but more on that later)

The roads through Hastings and down through Dannevirke and Masterton etc are very good and the scenery is as usual stunning and generally very green.

Then you hit the Tararua range and that's quite a shock as so far the road from Napier has been relatively flat. The range in contrast is very steep and 2nd gear was required all the way. I don't know how high you climb but it must be 500 mtrs + the view from the top is awesome.

The road down is equally as steep and there are some very tight corners, for some reason we didn't meet any large trucks on the straight bits but always on the tightest corners, which added to my grey hair problem a bit.

Wellington is the Capital of NZ and is a large city which has seriously run out of space, which was very limited to start with by the looks of things. Houses are perched on top of the surrounding hills and cantilevered off the side of the cliff in quite an alarming manner. I reckon the only way to extend the place it to follow the Venice principal.

We arrived at the Top 10 park with little trouble (is Jackie getting good at this map reading business?) just the odd extra grey hair that's all. We stick to the top 10 sites where ever possible as we have a discount card and they are always of a high standard, with no nasty surprises.

We had now traveled about 340k's from Napier with just a couple of stop offs and were both tired. But we only had this afternoon in Wellington (as I said more on that later) so we girded up our loins and caught the bus into the city. It's reminiscent of pretty much every large city in the centre but it is close to the harbour and has some great walks, museums and parks etc. We had a meal in town and headed back to the park, wishing we had more time to look around.

Later that evening Jackie looked at me went white and said what day is it? I thought this odd as she generally has a strong grasp on the days of the week sequence. After checking "Thursday" said I, she went still paler, "what date is it" said she, as usual I had no idea so checked my watch "the 15th" I said "Gulp" said she "we are booked onto the ferry on Saturday the 17th !!

So our wish came true and we have another day in Wellington tomorrow. Neither of us had checked the ticket properly, but we did ask our agent for a ticket to travel on the ferry on day 8 and not day 9, but such is the joy of travel............