Te Papa and Picton

The next day, we were catching the ferry to the South Island in the afternoon, so while we had a little time we wanted to visit Te Papa, the most famous museum in New Zealand.

We immediately ran to the special exhibit, which was created by Weta Workshop:

It's a display about the war going on in New Zealand during World War I.  The displays are supposed to be larger than life, depicting super realistic soldiers.  The soldiers were made with a 3-D printer at Weta Workshop (where we took a tour the day before).  

We were so excited to see what all the fuss was about, until we got there and saw this:

We were told it was a 2 hour wait to get in!!  We didn't really have that kind of time, since we had a ferry to catch, so we had to skip it and just walk around the rest of the museum.  Huge bummer!

However, I found pictures online of a few of the soldiers, so you could see:

Amazing, isn't it??

So, let's see the rest of Te Papa.

There are a bunch of different sections and exhibits, but what stood out the most was this one:

and it was mostly because of this guy:

This squid (in case you didn't read the blurb in the picture) is the only giant squid on display on the planet.  I don't know about you, but I find the creatures of the deep ocean to be fascinating.  My favorite episode of the Planet Earth series is the episode about the deep oceans.  And of course, one of the more interesting and terrifying creatures of the deep ocean is the giant squid.  I loved this display!  Sooooo fricken cool!  Not to mention all the cool stuff that came with it:

Awesome!  I'm geeking out all over this stuff, pushing little kids out of the way to get my pictures.

More of the exhibit:

Next exhibit: Bush City

Ignore this stupid hag ruining my picture and try to focus on the map.  It's an outdoor forest resembling the actual forests of New Zealand.

It was beautiful, but it can't compare with the real forests we've seen.  Moving on.

Pretty courtyard:

Damn all people in my way!!!

The Gallipoli line from upstairs:

Yup, still crazy from all the way up here.

New Zealand exhibit:

The weta again:

Okay, that one's pretty big.

There was a huge Maori exhibit:

They had a copy of the Waitangi Treaty:

Canoes are big in Maori culture:

Maroi house:

This was some type of common room, which we were able to enter if we took our shoes off and took no pictures.

It was really gorgeous on the inside, with intricate carvings on every inch of every wall.

It was a great exhibit, but we'd already seen a lot of this at Te Puia, the Maori cultural center a couple weeks prior.  

The museum was well put together and sums up New Zealand perfectly, but for people like us who've seen all this stuff in the "real world," it was kind of anticlimactic.  This is the place to be if you're only in New Zealand a short time and/or aren't seeing many sights.  This is a perfect way to see it all in one place.

After the museum, we walked around Wellington one last time:

There was a strip with all these sea cans:

and then one opened and we realized they're little shops:

Cool!

It was time to go, so we went back to the hostel, grabbed our luggage and took a cab to the ferry terminal:

The ferry took about 3 hours, but was very comfortable with a full restaurant, a movie theater and shops.  We ended up just napping most of the way.  I did get up at one point and go outside to take some pictures as we passed through the Marlborough Sounds:

Stunning.

The ferry dropped us off in Picton, where we picked up our other car, which unfortunately was a bit smaller than Tui, so in our disappointment we named her Not Tui, which eventually turned into Pooey.  We jammed all our stuff and our bodies into Pooey and off we went.

It was already pretty late (the ferry was late picking us up), so we ran to the grocery store, where we saw this:

Whoa!  The robots are taking over sooner than we thought.

We found a drink we really like:

It's a carbonated lemonade and it's big in NZ.  Yummy!

We grabbed some dinner and snacks and drove about 30 minutes to a free campsite I found on my nifty CamperMate app:

Pooey is the puny gray car right behind that tree in front:

This is the Alfred Stream Reserve.  It was just a field (the stream was on the left), but at least it was free for the night.  We ate dinner and watched a movie on Aaron's phone in our living room AKA the car and then we went to bed in our bedroom AKA the car.  This car is our home for the week, so get used to it!

The next day, we officially started our road trip!  Woo hoo!