Anyway, I woke up to the sounds of my 6am alarm and discovered that despite my fears we had just turned into Queen Charlotte Sound on our way in to Picton.
The captain backed into the dock - this is the view from our cabin as we were approaching and even at this distance you can barely see the dock.
We docked on time and were able to leave the ship quite quickly. This is a busy working port, it seems they export a lot of logs - this is just a small part of it, as viewed from my cabin:
We got off the ship quite quickly, almost no wait for a shuttle. We picked up our hire car without any hassles, and headed off towards Blenheim.
First stop was the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre. Really good display of WW1 vintage aircraft - some original, some reconstructions. Also a lot of smaller informative displays about a large number of famous wartime pilots, including lots of items such as their flying gear, letters they wrote, photographs etc etc
The aviation heritage centre was mostly for Paul's interest, but right next door was the place for me - Omaka Classic Cars. Heaps of classic cars, almost all from the 60s and 70s but some earlier ones also. I really enjoyed this.
They're mostly cars that were "new in New Zealand" and there are some Australian cars - this lovely old classic was apparently imported into NZ for the use of the General Manager of GM in New Zealand.
After this we drove the long way around to the Makana Chocolate and Confectionary store. This one is a regular on ships tours, and they make it sound like there's an actual tour where you get to see the chocolates made, but it's really just a shop. We did spend some money there though!
As I said, we went the long way around to the chocolate place - this was to see if there was anything interesting to look at along the way. There is actually, if you're into wine - I have never seen so many vineyards - and the area is renowned for its wine. Maybe we'll get back here one day when we can actually stay nearby and try some of the wine; we didn't bother today.
Last stop was Blenheim - we parked the car and had lunch at a Turkish restaurant. I should have taken a photo - all I can say is if we had small serves I couldn't imagine anyone getting through a large one! Pretty good food.
Then, back to Picton to drop off the car - again, no problems. We had to top up the fuel of course - we only used about 8 litres but at $2.05 per litre it still added about $17 to the price for the day.
However, I think we did much better than we would have on a ship's tour . The ship was offering a tour of 3 hours 45 minutes where you got to see the Aviation Heritage Centre and the chocolate shop, and a brewery. Now, the heritage centre costs $35, or $45 if you get the guided tour which I presume you would if you took the ship's tour. The chocolate place doesn't have an entry fee, nor does the brewery. So, car hire for us, including the petrol, was about $135. Even if we had gone for the guided tour at the aviation centre, we'd have only spent another $90. So, basically $240 for the day for both of us to do the ship's tour ourselves, with the added bonus that you can go other places if you want to, and of course you aren't caught up in the crowds (we were very lucky; we didn't see any of the big ship's tours anywhere). My point is though that for the ship's tour they were charging almost twice as much - $219 per person. It really can be much more sensible to organise your own tours and not do the ship's ones. (Not always the case, but always worth checking out).
The captain made an announcement at dinner that the last night had reached 150kph, not just gusts but sustained at that speed. No wonder the ship was rocking around a bit. He warned us that there will be more of the same tomorrow.
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