Pretending to know about wine

Last night we had our first bad experience with freedom camping. There's a bit of a bad vibe around it and some people are very anti camping for free because they believe the campers contribute nothing to the economy. I mean it's not like they pay tax on diesel, pay road user charges as well as actually buying or renting the camper in the first place. I do understand the frustration with people who go to the toilet anywhere they feel like or clean their teeth and spit it in a bush as we have seen this ourselves but people with genuine self contained vans have no need to do any of the above. Luckily the laws changed last year so now only vans that can have an accessible toilet with the bed made up can be certified self contained, this will get rid of the backpacker cars which only just fit a bed in the back and buy a toilet just to get the self contained status to then ditch it. So last night at about 11pm a guy in a red ute which we think is from the farm across the road came into the field where everyone is parked up and started beeping his horn. Nick opened a curtain to look which resulted in him pulling up right by our window and beeping continuously until we opened the curtain and he sped away. It did put us both on edge and we hope it's our only run in with any negativity. On the bright side we woke up to a visit from a wild, although not so wild, cat outside who was rather adorable. We hit the road to Kurow, a town about 1km long if that. There's a big wine industry in New Zealand so we stopped for a wine tasting followed by a morning snack of pizza because who doesn't need pizza as a snack. The woman was lovely and we had the place to ourselves. We weren't bowled over by any wines but it was a good experience seeing as it's a big thing here. Our next stop was Duntroon, an even smaller town, where we had planned to spend the night because there was a campsite mentioned on our app that offers clothes washing as well. After checking out the facilities we found they were in a small scout hall style building and there was no washing machine so we decided to not stay and move on. Before we did so we visited some Maori rock paintings which unfortunately were not that impressive. Most had been removed by early settlers and the ones remaining were very faded or had graffiti on. The surrounding cliffs were quite impressive though and resembled honeycomb in structure. We also went to Elephant Rocks which is a site like Castle Hill which we visited previously that has huge limestock rock formations. Disappointingly there aren't any rocks shaped like elephants but with huge grey boulders you can see how it got it's name. We'd booked into another campsite listed on Campermate only to arrive and discover it's in a woman's back garden which is very angled. It had started raining and with her assistance we tried to park in a level spot which ended in us starting to get stuck in the mud. We were worried we'd be stuck and unable to get out if we stayed so we decided it was best to leave. Even then getting out with hardly any rain the van struggled to get traction. In the end we went all the way to Omaru and paid for a Top 10 campsite so we had power, good showers and managed to do 3 loads of washing which we've been needing to do for ages. As the washing was on and Nick was making dinner we played the Game of Life which they had for communal use. We had a lovely evening in the end so despite trying 3 campsites it all worked out for the best and now we have lovely clean clothes too!Læs mere