Wellington and the Martinborough region

From Wanganui we made our way down south. We had organized a little couch surfing in Lower Hutt near Wellington but we had a couple days to kill in between and what better way than with beach camping and wine tasting?
We headed out to a reserve of a cape in the south, east of Wellington. The campsite was in a canyon next to a dry lake bed across the road from a beautiful black beach. The next morning we got up and prepared ourselves for a long day of drinking in New Zealands only red wine area and there fore our favorite!
We made it through three wineries before we had to take a break for lunch to avoid aaron buying ridiculous amounts of wine, and to avoid me well just falling over.
In the afternoon we headed down to Wellington and spent the first of several days downtown. Cuba street mall is their version of pearl street and its full of really artsy stores all very indy with local screen printing and stuff like that so of course we spent a while wondering down there before making our way to Lower Hutt to meet our second round of Couch surfing hosts. We stayed with two brothers, Li and Rumi and Li's girlfriend Michelle. The boys are both in forestry management and they also do a lot of wood work so their house had lots of cool in progress pieces around and their garden was beautiful.
Their backyard connected with a path through the woods that meets up with a small town across the bay from wellington. it was really steep but only took about an hour and we used it to get into town. While we were waiting for the ferry we even got to see a family of Orca's in the bay!
We spent mos of the second day wondering downtown upset at how everything was closed on sunday's and the streets were empty. It made a nice day for exploring the waterfront area though and going to Te Papa, their national museum.
The waterfront is a really awesome area with functional art all along the way serving as a diving board into the water, a crazy bridge and a kayak practice area of sorts where we got to see a sting ray. Te Papa is some six levels and we spent almost the entire day in there and it wasn't enough to see everything. We got stuck in this crazy interactive center where you could take movies and pictures of yourself or off the internet and post them on these big walls in the museum with these funny little wands. Aaron was giggling for like an hour.
Our last day in the city before boarding the ferry to the south island was spent on the trolley and in the botanical garden. We nerded out and spent a good bit of time in the cable car museum reading about the history of cable cars and their influence on public transport in wellington...
anyway.
The ferry over was uneventful but it delivered us into Picton around 11pm and we spent the night in the car in a park parkinglot...