Road Trip Day 20 – Kyle’s Birthday!!! Wanganui to Wellington

Starting Point: Wanganui
Ending Point: Wellington
Kilometers traveled: 241

Today was Kyle’s Birthday!!

We got up, had a fantastic breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, guacamole, & cheese piled up on a toasted crumpet and then topped with beetroot chutney! YUM! And some fresh strawberries we picked up from the Windemere Farms on the way into town yesterday. One of the perks of it being early spring here is all the amazing roadside produce.

Then we headed South with very little stopping. We did stop off in Foxton to see the De Molen Windmill. Foxton also had a Route 66 Diner, but they weren’t open, so we just took a picture of the sign.

And then we stopped off the the Icebreaker outlet store in Oataki to do a bit of birthday shopping. Kyle needed a full zip lightweight jacket. Super score was that they were having a huge clearance sale, so the jacket was more than half off. Then we headed into Wellington and then on over to the Hutt Valley to check into our holiday park. We had a coupon for a free night, which was nice.

Then we headed on into Wellington. We parked at the Te Papa, which is their huge national museum and then went wandering down along the quay. There were all sorts of people milling about and watching what turned out to be a traditional war canoe demonstration for birthday boy, Charles, Prince of Wales, who was in town. We stumbled onto his birthday celebration and even got a glimpse of him in his car as they drove away when it was over. Kyle had forgotten that they share the same birthday, although Charles is 20 years older and aging much worse than Kyle. It was still cool to see him though! It was our first celebrity sighting of the trip.

After all that excitement, we wandered around in Wellington a bit. Kyle wanted either Indian or Thai food for his birthday, but we were there at an odd hour (3 pm) and they were all closed. So we settled for an Irish Pub and shared a chicken schnitzel sandwich and some Tui IPAs (only our second time drinking beer since arriving in NZ…beer here is very expensive so we usually drink wine or the rum we bought on our way out of Fiji).

After lunch we wandered a bit more and then decided to spend a little bit of time looking at a few of the exhibits in the Te Papa. The Te Papa is huge, so we’ll spend most of tomorrow there as well. Thank goodness for free admission, including for tourists!

We stopped off at a bakery during our wandering and picked up 2 slices of custard cream cake for Kyle’s birthday celebration. I’m going to sign off now so I can go and sing to him and we can eat it. Hope you have a great day!