On to Nelson

A short drive from Picton is the city of Nelson which was our next destination, we had all sorts of grand plans for Nelson, some diving (as we'd missed out on diving the wreck of the Mikhail Lermontov
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;jsessionid=bdiiqi45uiia?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=Mikhail+Lermontov+%28ship%29&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1&sbid=lc02b&linktext=Mikhail%20Lermontov%20(ship) in Picton) at Pupu Springs (supposedly the best underwater visability in the world) http://www.seafriends.org.nz/images/pupu.htm
brewery trips (quite a lot of microbreweries in the area and Mac's one of NZ's best selling beers), horse riding, walking, quad biking, blah, blah, blah.
As it turned out we spent 4 days here and did pretty much none of the above. The brewery trips never had enough people booked on to make the trips worth their while, the diving onlt happened on a Thursday and was NZ$240 each for just a single tank dive (although Rich did speak to a guy at a dive shop who told him that he would hire him all the gear he needed including the tanks and that we could dive it on our own, but given our level of experience we wrote this off as a bad idea!), so that was a no go. The only thing that we did manage to get ourselves booked on to was at trip on Quad bikes around some local mountains just outside Nelson.
So, all in all we didn't end up doing a great deal, we went to a local water tube (we were the eldest on it of course), played some mini-golf (Rich winss, again), did some sleeping in the park like a right couple of old types and read a lot while the weather had it's fun with us.
The quad bikes did make up for it all though, they were really good fun, we had half an hour practising to ride them as they were geared and quite powerful and then about 3 hours riding around the mountains to see a bloody big old tree (4o metres high and 1500 years old, and that's considered small and young for a Maui tree!) and some fantastic views from the mountain tops. The best part of it though (Rich thinks) was that they allowed us a couple of laps on the fun track where Rich got the bike up to 80KPH and went steaming through a very large puddle of sheep crap!
After the biking we headed for Blenhiem and the Malborough wine region to sample their wares:-)