Holiday Trip Day 2

Monday morning we were all up at the crack of dawn.

We pitched our tents between this road and some bushes; right on the other side of the bushes was the sea!

There were gorgeous flowers along the shore.

There was also a lot of Silverbeet (Swiss Chard) growing wild.  We harvested some for our supper the first night (it tasted quite salty!), and also for lunch and supper the second night.

While we were eating breakfast around the trailer, we got to watch sheep walking along the very edge of the cliff above us!

Baby doesn’t mind his surroundings too much, so long as he has his mama!

This was the view to the east of our campsite.  While the trailer was being tarped, some of us walked down the road to the fence in the distance.

After we left our campsite, we drove around the Lake Grasmere Saltworks.  Those are huge piles of sea salt, produced by evaporation from huge ponds.

The salt evaporation ponds.

See the salt along the edge?

Vineyards near Blenheim.

This is the kind of route we were driving a lot of the day.

We stopped just north of Blenheim to cook hamburgers for lunch at a rest area beside the highway.  The boys enjoyed playing in the bushes.

Our first family picture with the baby!

We stopped in Picton in the late afternoon.  After spending an hour or two in an aquarium, we went to the marina for awhile.  The boys and their dad walked around looking at the boats, while the rest of us waited at the van.  We got to see this car ferry coming in!

The ship had to turn around and back into the dock.

Late in the afternoon, we left Picton and headed up the hill on the Queen Charlotte Drive, intending to go halfway to Havelock to a campground for the night.  As we climbed the hill over the town, we saw an overlook–and of course, had to stop.  There was the other car ferry coming in, the Interislander.

We stayed to watch the Interislander back into her slip (quite a feat, in my opinion!) and unload.  See both ferries, side by side?

Cars and trucks were coming off the top deck of the Interislander, and trains were being unloaded from the lower deck.  That is a locomotive pushing two flat cars in; they hooked up to a string of eight freight cars and pulled them out, then went back in for more.