And so we are home.
We thought we’d be one more night on the road, but L got the call up for a bowls competition tomorrow, so we thought we’d do the trip from New Plymouth to Wellington in a day.
But before we left, we took Chaddie’s one-hour tour of the New Plymouth harbour in an old British lifeboat that had been built on the Isle of Wight and which did service in Yorkshire. L will fill you in on the details, but suffice to say we both enjoyed it.
Then it was south along the Surf Highway, where we saw our last lighthouse of the trip, the Cape Egmont lighthouse. We saw two actually. One was at the Cape Egmont Boat Club and had been decommissioned in 2000. For the working lighthouse, the best we could do was see it in the distance across some fields.
A short stopover to catch up with friend C in Wanganui and then it was the last part of the journey. Deciding to come home today meant we didn’t quite manage our goal of staying off Highway 1 — we’d planned to cut back across to the Wairarapa and come home that way, but instead we took the more direct route from Wanganui which meant joining SH1 at Bulls. Probably a good idea we do the Wairarapa bit because, with our navigation skills, there was always the chance we’d get stuck in that Masterton loop.
That’s it for tonight. I’ll do a proper wrap tomorrow.
Off Highway One 