We’ve again got a lot of catching up to do and I even need to look through the photos to remind myself of what we’ve been up to. Oh right, the Wellington Beer Festival. The festival was, of course, a blast. We think that we’ve really found our niche working at these events. Despite some pretty heavy rain there was still a good crowd of Wellingtonians who turned out and seemed unfazed by the weather. As I would expect, as the day went on and the beer flowed, people seemed to become less and less bothered by the rain. A few folks even showed up in their wetsuits and made the most of the rain and the beer. One of the best parts of working these beer festivals is being on the receiving end of a wide variety of ploys, tactics, winks, nods, and begging all in the name of free beer. We served beer for eight hours. Which means that people were drinking for eight solid hours. Which means that we were once again treated to entertainment of the highest quality. But, the best part of being in Wellington for the beer festival was getting to meet up with our good friends Ron and Jill Trigg, Ursula (WWOOFer extraordinaire from South Africa), and the brewery’s newest brewer Tom. It was like meeting up with old friends, and we had a great night out on the town the day before the festival. We had quite a bit to drink, which worked in favor of us not drinking up all the profits the next day (It’s very easy to drink and pour at the same time during these events). We really enjoyed the company of our good friends here and we will certainly miss them for the next few months as we head to the South Island. We don’t know what are plans will be when we head back north, but it will be tempting to pay another visit to “Taradise” and White Cliff Organic Brewery.
We spent one more day in Wellington at Te Papa–the national museum. It’s a fairly new museum–only 8 or 9 years old I think, and it shows. All of the exhibits are very up to date and modern looking. None of that stale green colored background with white lettering in all of the wildlife taxonomy exhibits that are so universal. It’s really a gem of a museum, and we wandered around until we both had a serious case of museum foot setting in. We had pretty much been through the entire museum at that point, so it was a good time to head out of the city and get back to exploring the countryside.
For the next couple of days we drove around to the sparsely populated Cape Palliser coast. Joanie flirted with fur seals, we checked out the lighthouse and its 250+ steps, and we paid a visit to the Putangurua Pinnacles. The little fishing town of Ngawi was also a highlight with their collection of colorful bulldozers that are used to launch fishing boats right from the beach. Check out all the new pictures on Flickr to see more of what we’ve been up to. The days went by quickly and soon we were back on our way to Wellington for our North Island Tour Part 1 Grand Finale!
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Tags: brewery, coast, lighthouse, museums