Leaving Nelson
Sarah says:
The best plan we made for this whole adventure was renting this house and staying put in a small foreign town for 5 weeks.
When you isolate yourself entirely from your normal environment - take yourself out of your own home, your own tv, your phone ringing, go without your own friends or family - cool things start to happen. You get past the normal niceness of a two week vacation to the beach. You reach a kind of clear head that none of us have probably had since we were kids totally taking summer vacation for granted. David has been writing songs, I’ve been drawing and painting, we’ve been cooking these really incredible dinners and having really cool conversations. We’re still doing touristy stuff and looking around shops and stuff - but literally half the time we’ve been in this town we’ve done nothing. Really nothing but sit in that lovely tree house which totally allows us to do things we’re too tired or can’t be bothered to do at home when we have a spare hour or two. We fully realize that this is rare and will go away as soon as we step back into a city with 4 million people. It is really no wonder that writers and artists take themselves away to mountain cabins or isolated beaches to just be. I highly recommend it. Based on our findings, it takes an adult with a normal amount of built-up stress at least 2 months to rid themselves of it. Sounds impossible to the American work ethic but it’s not, people. Can we inspire just one person to do this, too??
When not doing nothing, here are some other cool things we’ve done:
1. Abel Tasmen National Park. Whatever you dream turquoise water, white sand beaches and tropical forest to look like - this is it. We did a full day kayaking up to a beach where we slept for a night and then hiked a full day further up the coast. Awesome.
2. Farewell Spit. Basically a 10 mile sandbar that stretches out into the ocean. On the northern tip of the southern island. Since they’ve turned it into a bird sanctuary it’s impossible for grubby tourists to traverse it on their own. You have to pay to go on a tour which we agreed to do since a 10 mile sand bar sounded cool to us. 
Little did we know that the median age on these tours is about 75. We totally blew their statistical data the day we went. The woman behind us had to repeat every single thing the guide said to her deaf husband - loudly. The couple across the aisle had something terrible in their lungs they had to cough up for 4 hours straight not to mention the elephant call they blew into their cotton hankerchiefs. Most of the bus had support socks pulled to their knees and the women were growing hair where they shouldn’t. Still, the sandbar was lovely and we got to play on really cool sand dunes. And we got cool pictures!
We leave Nelson bright and early Monday morning, March 7th. Our route will take us down the west coast where we will leave the sun and warm for quite a while. First stop: the town of Greymouth just for a night as we make our way to Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers.
Our little seafoam Corolla is all gassed up and we’re ready to go. More from the road!
Love,
Your favorite travelers,
Sarah & Dave
Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.