Day 35 – Sunday, February 8th, 2025 – Napier, New Zealand

In my research before the cruise, I found a company called Driving Miss Daisy that did accessible tours out of Napier. We only had a limited time on the island. The ship docked at 7:00 and we had to leave by 1:30. Because we need an hour on both ends that made it even shorter. So in working with, Terry, the lady at the company, I assumed the tour we were getting was just a winery tour. I was wrong in a good way. Before I get to that though in my conversations with Terry she said make sure security knows that Tom, the driver, needs special security access to get into where the ship is. Honestly, I kind of blew it off because everywhere we go the private tour buses we're stacked right up against the Princess tour buses. One thing we've learned about New Zealand is their security is much tighter than any country we've been to before. I mentioned the whole visa fiasco earlier. So, we get off the ship at 730. The only way to get into the town is to get on a bus which takes you into town. Well, we told Tom to meet us at the gate. The bus we got on went right past the gate. The bus dropped us off about two miles from the ship. We then had to communicate through Terry to Tom where we were. Thankfully, by the time we figured this out it was 8:00. Being a New Zealander must require you to be friendly at all times. Even though I screwed up Tom was super friendly. He had a rear loading van with a very funky strap system that literally pulled my chair in. That was kind of cool. He gets me in the van and I am strapped down. When I said I was strapped down I meant to the point where I could barely move in the chair. It must be that New Zealander security thing again. So, we drive about a mile down the road before Tom pulls off into a safer area. Because I'm in the back of the van and I have terrible hearing, I get next to nothing of the near 15 minute speech Tom gives Mary. Honestly, I don't care that much.

My first impression of Napier held throughout the whole visit. It is a very modern, very clean and, frankly, beautiful area. I hope the pictures show this. We took about 100 pictures but I only uploaded about 20 of them. Uploading pictures is still a challenge, but I will look through them and make sure I get the best 20 or so.

We started the tour by going through Napier proper. It's about a 10 block square city area. There are no tall buildings or anything like that. It's just looks like a downtown area. It's very clean. It looks very modern. From there we drive pretty much straight up until we get to Hawkes Bay Bluff Park. As I understand it, Napier is on the North Island. So when you look off of this bluff you are looking down on the port. We could see our ship And the logs on the wharf near the ship. The other thing I forgot to mention is Napier, and New Zealand in general apparently, exports a lot of logs to China. I'm not sure the pictures for Napier show this, but the pictures in Picton show it better. Without exaggeration, there's probably a million logs or more on the dock outside of a ship. Tom provided some historical information about the area. Because of its location and height it was used for artillery placement in various wars. The weather was perfect so you could see forever on this tall bluff. Mostly you looked out to sea.

Tom put me back in the van and we drove a ways to Arataki Honey visitor center. It was kind of a honey museum of sorts. It had a lot of information on bees. New Zealand is known for exporting apples too. When we were driving on the road we saw miles of apple trees. We learned that bees are the primary pollinators for apple trees. While they are not directly needed for wine vines, they do help in other ways. They had a honey tasting section. If I remember right, there were 10 different kinds of honey. We were able to taste all of them. They were surprisingly different. We ended up buying 3 little jars. They also had a nice selection of T-shirts so we bought T-shirts. It was an educational stop. We learned quite a bit about the bee.

Going up the bluff was nothing like going up to our next stop. It literally seesawed back and forth up. Every time it turned a new corner the view was that much more amazing. Finally, we got to the end and it was called Te Mata Park. It is 399 meters above sea level. This is where the majority of the pictures were taken. Every view was prettier than the next. We spent an hour up there before getting back in the car and seesawing our way back down. We had to share the road with walkers and bikers. I can't imagine biking up this hill. We are not talking one or two. I can safely say there were probably as many walkers and bikers as there were cars going up and down that hill. That's one thing I've noticed in New Zealand is a lot of walkers, hikers, bikers everywhere. When you got to the top of the hill you could do trails for hiking.

We drove for another 30 minutes or so until we pulled into the driveway of the Mission Winery. It is the oldest winery in New Zealand. It is known for its Chardonnay. We were given a private tasting. Our presenter's name was Alexi. For about 30 to 45 minutes she explained the different wines. We tasted four or five of them. We had a sparkling wine then we had a the Chardonnay, then we tried the Rose and finally we had a taste of their Cabernet franc. We liked the sparkling wine. We like the Chardonnay. I liked the Cabernet franc. We ended up buying these three and one more which I can't remember the name of right now. We decided to bring them on the ship and take them home on our own. It costs too much money to ship them to the states. I think the four bottles came to about 75 American dollars. We were there about an hour before we loaded back up and headed back into town.

If you've been paying attention to previous excursions, what is the one thing that we needed to get accomplished yet? If you said ‘send  postcards’, you are spot on. If you didn't guess postcards, you need to read a little closer. So we drove back into town. Tom found us a post office where Mary went in and bought stamps. She put the letters in the outgoing slot. She got back in the van and we headed back to the cruise ship. As mentioned earlier, security is tight. They would not let Tom and his van into the area where the cruise ship was. We pulled up to the gate and the security there asked all kinds of questions. They use their radios to talk to somebody. After about 10 or 15 minutes of back and forth they finally let tom through the gate but he had to be escorted by a security vehicle. We were just happy they let him in. Otherwise we probably would have had to gone out to one of the bus stops and take a bus in. Thankfully, that did not happen. We drove up to the cruise ship. He unloaded me. We said our goodbyes. He was escorted out.

As we were getting on to the ship there were a series of old cars. I'm not exactly sure what they had to do with Napier, New Zealand, but they were cool old cars. They also had a jazz band. We got on this ship and headed to the room.

To put it simply, this was an amazing stop. What was supposed to just be a winery turned out to be almost five hours of nonstop adventure. The van was nice. Tom was great. What we saw was awesome. Well worth the money. We got a good taste of what New Zealand is like.

I also do a time lapse later of the ship leaving the port. By the time we did these, it was time for dinner. We cleaned up and headed downstairs.

For dinner, Mary had chicken Kiev and salad. She said the chicken was pretty good. For my appetizer I had a salmon in puff pastry thing. It was good. I have the same salad as Mary. For my entree I had what they called a Nantucket dinner which was shrimp and scallops in a tomato based stew. It was really good – one of those things I could eat every day. I think I've said that about 5 or 6 things so far so maybe not every day. Dinner was good. We wanted to get in and out because we wanted to go to the 730 show.

We went to the Princess theater to see the rock edition of the Princess players, or something like that it was called. You can see from the videos what it was called. It was 45 minutes of the Princess band doing various rock songs. They covered songs from AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Queen and Guns N Roses, to name a few. The lead guitar did a pretty good job. The vocals were pretty good. Overall, I thought they did a very good job. It was a good 45 minutes. From there, we have to walk past the explorers lounge to get back to the cabin. A comedian was about to go on stage, so we found a seat. I don't remember his name right now, but he was kind of funny. He was an Indian and made fun of Indian culture. He made jokes about owning the 7-11 and being a taxi driver. We laughed in several spots. His set about 45 minute. Now it was almost 10:00. It had been a long day. So we headed to the room. It wasn't long after we were asleep.