Finding the Centre of New Zealand

Annemarie has been an excellent tour guide, figuring out logistics for our travels and fun places to check out.

After she made us both eggs and toast for breakfast we caught the bus to Stoke where we had a tour of Pic’s Peanut Butter factory. Annemarie made peanut butter by riding a bike and we learned all kinds of interesting facts about peanut butter (75% of US homes have peanut butter but only 25% of NZ homes do, arachiburyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth). We bought some PB with seeds and nuts in it (yummy!) but opted not to buy the 10 kg bucket of PB – that’s over 22 pounds!

Next we went back to Nelson and checked out some art galleries, stopped by the farmers market and bought strawberries and honeydew honey (a lighter, fruitier honey).Then we made our way to Queens Gardens to eat our lunch, a lovely spot with bridges going over a slow-moving waterway. 

Lunch gave us energy for the big exertion of the day-going to the Centre of New Zealand! It was only a 1/2 mile or so walk from the botanical reserve, but it was uphill the whole way-the equivalent of 20 flights of stairs! The view at the top was spectacular and worth the effort. 

Finally we went to the Nelson Regional Museum and were both enchanted with the Curious Contraptions exhibit, a collection of automatons from different artists. They were so much fun to operate! It’s really impressive what some people are able to dream up. The stained glass windows in the museum are beautiful.

We tried a place called The Fat Tui for dinner, I had a mussel fritter burger. The fritter itself was tasty, but there were way too many other items added to the burger, I had to cut it in half in order to fit it in my mouth, and even then a lot spilled out of the bun, it was a very messy experience!