Paul's birthday Cruise Day 6 - Sunday 4 October 2015 - Wellington

After yesterday's long walk we had a serious sleep in this morning.  Not long after reconnecting with the world I discovered a couple of Facebook messages from Adam saying that he had locked himself out of the house the previous evening.  Needless to say I got into a minor panic which didn't end until I purchased a prepaid SIM for my phone and called him, only to discover that Facebook had totally misled me with the "time" labels on the messages and Adam had it all completely under control.

However, on the bright side, my phone actually now functions as a phone instead of just a fancy camera, and it was really very cheap - for the SIM, a couple of hundred local calls and texts and a package of 200 minutes of calls and 100 texts back to Australia, and a small amount of data as well, it cost a grand total of $NZ29.

There's a cable car in the city which takes you up to the top of the Botanic Gardens and also to an observatory.  Yesterday there were huge queues for the cable car but today when we wandered by there were only a few people waiting. So, we went up and then decided to walk back down through the Botanic Gardens.  It was a really nice walk - no photos though because they're all still on my phone.

Once we got back into the city we wandered over to the wharfs to see the Markets - interesting, with lots of really nice hand made clothes, jewellery etc.  Then we staggered back to the ship and crashed for a few hours.

During the day the weather deteriorated noticeably.  I saw reports of 160kph winds (cyclone level) off Akaroa - where we should have been today - and the wind was quite strong by the time we got back on board.  The captain started to make an announcement during dinner and we all feared the worst, but he said that we would be leaving Wellington and sailing around in the Cook Straight overnight until it's time to go into Picton - which is apparently a fairly complex manoeuvre.  I'm still a bit concerned because he was saying how fortunate it is that the weather is due to abate at around 6am, when it's time for us to start the move towards Picton.  Sadly I'm pretty sure he was setting us up for a possible disappointment in the morning if the weather stays this bad.  Anyway, only time will tell.