Interim Update #1,273: It's Raining As Gabrielle Passes By

We're parked in a Top 10 Holiday Park in the Lower Hutt Valley, a suburb of Wellington, watching an all-day and all-night rain and wind "event" as former sub-tropical cyclone Gabrielle passes by, pummeling the North Island--many of the places we've visited in the past month--and closing down pretty much everything, even way down here in Wellington. There is much personal and property loss going on as the cyclone passes over. Much if not most of New Zealand's population and property is on the North Island, and is coastal, which is not a good place to be during hurricanes and cyclones (as they're called in the rest of the world), especially when your "normal" tides are 10 feet or more. But I digress.

We're fine. Today was to have been our day for crossing Cook Strait to the South Island. We'd been reading of 50 foot swells in the Tasman and Pacific waters, and I was not excited about a 4 hour crossing under those circumstances. About 2PM yesterday we got an email from InterIslander announcing that all ferry service between the two islands was cancelled for February 14th. With this, Vicki sprang into action, calling InterIslander, booking a back-up on Bluebridge for March 14th. Three hours on hold and constantly refreshing the ferries' bookings websites eventually yielded at booking on InterIslander for February 22nd, which is nothing less than a heroic feat, considering the thousands of persons whose travel plans and arrangements have been undone the last few days. Or weeks if you count Auckland's catastrophic flooding during the "atmospheric river" thing. We were to have spent five weeks on the South Island and to turn our camper back in to Jucy in Queenstown on March 19th. So now we'll spend just under 4 weeks on the South Island but return the camper as scheduled. And lose a day or two watching those old raindrops fall.

In retrospect, having the ferry cancelled is probably the the worst travel disruption we have experienced in our 15 years on the road. Not including COVID-19, of course, which shortened an Asian trip and cancelled a European one...but we kept on traveling, after a few months quarantined in Rebecca's driveway. So we really can't complain. At all. Especially in view of my preference for the North Island. And an upside to the delay is that I can now post about our week+ in wonderful Wellington in relative leisure.

The view from campsite #50