1-56 Bridge Street

It’s been an amazing two and a half months so far in New Zealand but we are looking forward to our travels! Nelson has been a wonderful home away from home. Literally, we could not have asked for a better city to live and work during our first few months. We will forever cherish our work, apartment, and friends. There are a few things we have not mentioned, like our amazing wine tasting experience, yoga classes, and MarchFest!

So about three weeks ago we went wine tasting. We only went to three of the many vineyards in the Nelson area, which are all within a twenty-minute radius. Each vineyard had its own unique style and tasting technique. Some of our favorite things from wine tasting were: learning how to properly taste wine (twirl, view the color, smell, then taste), developing a new vocabulary full of many creative and elaborate adjectives to describe the flavors, tasting the actual grapes that were fermented into the wine (in which we learned that all the grapes are red, even for white wine), and last but not least, quickly realizing that eating between vineyards is essential to surviving :). Our friend Chelsea was kind enough to be our sober driver. So, after tasting about thirty different wines, we headed on over to BarD for some food. Lucky for us, Debs (the owner) was there. She had Chef Richard make us a HUGE platter of food and of course, we ate every last bit.

As for yoga, Emily found a cute little hot yoga studio and attended a class when we first got to Nelson. It was right down the road from work/apartment, so it was the perfect location. After taking a class and meeting Robert and Andrea, the new owners from Seattle, Emily decided that she definitely wanted to take some more classes (as long as she had enough money!). Once again we lucked out. Robert and Andrea offered her free classes in exchange for a little bit of studio cleaning. AWsum! Even more AWsum was that they agreed to let Katie do it too if she was interested! Katie had never done yoga before, but was finally willing to try it out. After taking a class, Katie was all in too. We cleaned four times a week (Lindsay helped on her nights off), and it usually only took us about twenty minutes. Not too shabby! Looking back, we do wish we had taken a little more advantage of the situation. A lot of days we were too tired and lazy to go to a class after we got off of work, and all we wanted to talk about was what we were going to do for dinner. However, Robert and Andrea quickly became a special niche in what made Nelson so special!

MarchFest, yes, was in April. This year they introduced eleven different beers. Lindsay stuck to the beer while Emily and Katie drank the new Organic Old Mout Cider. Twas quite tasty! Several local bands played throughout the day, and it brought back good memories of our days in Athens. They had a variety of local food venues and the atmosphere continued to blossom as the night went on. We had a grand time and were pleased to come away with some fun souvenir mugs!


We all finally finished up work this past weekend. Katie finished Friday while Lindsay and Emily had to work Saturday and Sunday. We all agreed that the last few days of work dragged on because we were so excited to start our travels. On Katie’s day off she got a head start in packing and cleaning the house. She was busy making pizza dough, banana bread, applesauce, etc., for our road trip. Sunday and Monday were quite busy days. As you know, we decided to sell our car because it sadly would not make it around the south island due to the hill problem. And as much as we did not want to put money into another car- we decided to rent one. On Monday, we headed out to Ace car rental to get our car. As we were literally pulling in, the car decides to go curplunk. What in the world?! We freaked out for a second and then realized that we just ran out of gas! Thank goodness. So we got our rental car, which turned out to be another Subaru, and then headed back to sell our Subbie for a whopping 300 buckaroos. All our friends told us that we should hold out and wait for a better offer (who knows if it ever would have come), but we were just excited to get $100 back each.



After selling the car we grabbed lunch at some of our favorite restaurants, and then headed back to the apartment to take on the task of packing up. Katie and Lindsay piled bag after bag into the car while Emily worked on cleaning the place up some. Finally around 7pm we finished everything up and said goodbye to our little home on Bridge Street.

Bye Bye Bye Love, Bye Bye Nelson NZ! Hello backpackers, I think I’m gonna cry.