Rollin' with it!

After enjoying consistent warmth and sunshine in the North Island, we should have known we’d need to pay with some bad weather days. Well – those days are here in the South Island. Mother nature has ordered up a straight week of rain and fog. Rather than letting rainy days get us down, we’ve decided to roll with it and make the best of a wet situation.

Wine Tasting
What better way to spend a rainy day than taste some of New Zealand’s best wines? The Marlbourough region is the most famous wine growing area in this country – so we made this region our first stop after arriving on the ferry from the North Island. Kari had already mapped out a strategy in her head during the ferry crossing to visit two of our favourites. First we would visit Villa Maria which makes a wonderful Sauvignon Blanc. Kai and Vea were happy to stay parked in the Bula Bus while we went on our ‘wine tasting date’. Sampling wines here is free and more than 8 different types are offered. We enjoyed learning more about Villa Maria and the different vintages they produce. The ones we can buy in Canada are much different than those which we tasted. Much of Villa Maria’s best vintage only gets sold to New Zealand. Those lucky Kiwis! We had to splurge and buy one red and one white which we’ll save in our Bula Bus Wine Cellar. Next up on the wine tasting was Spy Valley – which is another of our favourites. Unfortunately we had already gone over our budget at Villa Maria – so we only sampled here and resorted back to our strategy of tasting everything, and then quickly dashing!

Kari excited to visit and sample her favourite wine – Villa Maria

The games we play
During these long stretches of driving, Vea has invented a very fun and competitive game to keep all of us entertained, which we call ‘Go Time!’ There are many different brands of camper van rentals and they each have their unique shapes, styles and bold colours / logos. Vea came up with a detailed scoring system of points based on each of the camper van brands. First person to spot and name the correct camper van brand scores their points, and winner of the day gets to choose a free fun family activity. Kari is well in the lead for this game, and has many family activity ideas ready to claim! This is a great way to keep Kai and Vea off their iPads and looking out the window at all of the beautiful scenery – even in the rain!

Vea’s score-card for the ‘Go Time’ game.

When we freedom camp we have no power, no wifi and we enjoy simple things like card games, conversation and our new favourite… the music appreciation game! (thanks to our friends Sarah and Wade in Kelowna who introduced us to this game and stocked our hard-drive with lots of diverse music). The game goes like this… pass the laptop in a circle and each person that receives it has to choose a song from the iTunes library. Everyone else has to try and name the song and artist to earn a point. It’s a fun game, and Kai and Vea now have a total appreciation for new types of music that they had never heard before. A homeschooling music lesson on it’s own!

Family runs
One of the best things about New Zealand is all the tramps that are accessible along the roadside everywhere we go. It seems like there’s one clearly marked around every corner. We’ve continued to enjoy our spontaneous family runs by taking turns choosing which ones to do. One of our most memorable recent runs was along a beautiful long stretch of coastal trail in Cape Foulwind, on the west coast. We did this run during a lull in the rain and a glimpse of sunshine which provided some amazing views of the rugged coast. At the end of the trail was a nice surprise to see a large colony of New Zealand Fur Seals. We loved watching them frolic and play in the huge surf that was rolling in.

A family run at Cape Foulwind during a break in the rain and some brief moments of sunshine

Drift Wood Animals
One of Norrie’s fond memories of his childhood is walking along beaches with his Dad and finding shapes of animal bodies and faces in natural found driftwood. We’ve passed this along to Kai and Vea – who have a great time collecting and comparing their opinions on what they see in the wood shapes. We found an amazing piece of driftwood last week in which all of us immediately and unanimously agreed that it was a shape of a small penguin. This penguin has been brought on board the Bula Bus and we’ve affectionally called her ‘Korora’ – which is the name for one of New Zealands smallest indigenous penguin (thanks Grandpa Science for the name recommendation).

Our new driftwood penguin friend – named Korora

Hunker Down!
The rain hasn’t gotten us down in spirit, but lately it has caused us to hunker down in our Bula Bus. Without radio or TV, and very infrequent Wifi – we’ve been a bit out of touch with weather forecasts. Yesterday we found ourselves caught in the middle of a severe weather system caused by an offshore cyclone which produced huge swells and gail force winds which approached 150 km/h.

The camp site we were staying in unfortunately was located right next to the beach, so we had a pretty sleepless night while the wind increased in strength. This is how we learned that the Bula Bus can dance. She can really bust a move! We were relieved to see daylight in the morning, but soon realized that the power was out all over town from the storm. Winds were still gail-force, but we needed to make it 35 km south to the next town so we could find a powered campsite to charge the batteries in the Bula Bus.

If we knew what the drive was going to be like, we would have stayed put and hoped for the power to return. The severe winds made the drive quite a white-knuckle experience for Norrie, and a near breakdown experience for Kari. We drove slowly and navigated the narrow windy coastal stretches cautiously. Arriving in town at our powered campsite was a huge relief. We heard that all roads and bridges north and south of us had just closed after we arrived. Whew!

All 4 now!