Day 357 – 04.07.2016

NZ. South Island

Geraldine – Christchurch – Kaikoura

Countdown: 10 days until flying home

Today’s main goal was to get a car mirror. A car mirror, you might wonder? Yes!

The whole thing started with our Day 305 car accident. Although it wasn’t our fault, we lost our car insurance. Then on Day 327 we had yet another person driving into our car. Because we didn’t have a car insurance anymore, we had to pay a 2000 Dollar bond, until the insurance of the other party would cover the expenses. We were lucky and we got our money back. However, on Day 331 our car had been vandalized overnight and the passenger side mirror had been kicked off.

So, since we obviously don’t know who did it, we would have to pay the 2000 Dollar and probably not see any of it again. We had been looking for a mirror already in Nelson, but we were unlucky. In Christchurch we were told we would have a better chance. We called the place and we were lucky, they had a Nissan Tida mirror and they reserved it for us. A few days after the call we realized that we had reserved the wrong mirror, called again and were lucky yet again, they had the other type too.

So today was the big day, we drove to the place and hoped it would really be the right one. And it was and we bought it. We asked there where we could get it painted and fitted and drove just to that place, left the mirror there and hopefully on Thursday or Friday we go there and they fit it for us. I can’t believe it. We will have a brand new mirror.

Then we continued our trip from Christchurch to our final destination Kaikoura.

On our way we stumbled across Cookie Time. The place we had visited in Queenstown and because we had not enough time, we couldn’t spent any time in there and the kids were very sad. I had promised them that we would go into the second shop in NZ, which is in Christchurch. Today I kept my promise.

With a booth filled with cookies we continued to Kaikoura. Kaikoura is beautiful. The beach is a dream and one can see the mountains while standing and watching the waves. 

We are planning on staying here for three nights. Tomorrow we want to do some whale watching and then there is a day planned when we go kayaking. As a final treat I could add some of the sunset photos of today, but the photos wouldn’t be half as nice as the sky was, so I won’t.