Travelling Home

It's been great touring Tasmania but the time has finally come to set off for home.

We packed up, loaded the car and headed for the car hire place. With a leisurely 12:20 pm departure time we had some time up our sleeve so, on the advice of the Motel lady, we made a detour to Richmond for a coffee. This is where they have an iconic stone bridge which helped open up the farmland around Hobart. Once again, this was built by convict labour.

We returned the car and I calculated we had driven just on 2,000 km in the last couple of weeks. Being a hybrid, it really was fuel efficient. My rough calculation showed us getting around 4.8l/100 km. Our Forester shows a cumulative figure (after 90,000 km) of 7.8l/100km.

Once at the airport we had to do the annoying security checks twice! The first time was getting though the domestic security. Miriam had to take her shoes off and me, my belt. Then my bag had to go through the scanning machine three times because they could see some scissors in the toilet bag. We should have put these in the checked in luggage but forgot - these were our two sets of nail scissors. Bugger.

After a break for a light snack we then moved through to the International departure area and once again had to go through security. At least that was a lot simpler and less crowded.

In the end, the plane was about 40 minutes late leaving because they had been delayed coming over from NZ and they had to wait while our food supplies were loaded.

The flight back was a bit bumpy but no big deal and we did get fed.

Once in Auckland we flew back to Christchurch arriving in the dark at around 10 pm. We then had a small hiccup because the shuttle pick-up location for Airpark Canterbury had been moved (by the airport authority). We didn't know this so ended up doing a lot of walking in nasty cold showery rain but finally got to the van for the 5 minute drive to our car.

The drive back to Kaikoura was pretty unpleasant with a smeary windscreen, passing showers and low cloud not helping. At least there wasn't much traffic. The weird thing is our car felt quite strange to drive. The Toyota we hired was a pleasure to drive as well as being economical. I also miss the Android Auto which can display the Sygic sat nav on the big screen. The phone attached to the windscreen looks quite pathetic now. We finally arrived home at around 1:30 am. Pip was very pleased to see us and hasn't stopped going on at us and wanting cuddles for most of today. She is very pleased we are home though.

So that's it for this blog.

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