Next stop: Wellington.

We don’t have much to report from Wellington, except to say that we stayed in a hostel run by a very grumpy man. The weather took a turn for the worse and we ended up putting up our tent in the rain. Luckily the Australian Open final was on TV in the evening, giving us the perfect excuse to escape to the pub. We found a sports bar and settled in to watch the match. This turned into an epic battle and we only managed to stay for the first two sets. The result didn’t exactly go our way in the end, so we were rather glad that we left early.

The main news from today actually occured en route. I drove the first section, and after a couple of hours we stopped in the town of Bull, a town like no udder, to swap over. Incidentally the small buisiness holders here have gone to town with their shop names. We couldn’t resist stopping for a drink at Coffee on the Moove. Our changeover happened at a BP service station.

We were back on the main road and travelling at around 100 kph when the car suddenly lost power. Thankfully we were on one of the very few long, straight roads with a wide shoulder. Graham pulled over and we checked in the manual to see what the flashing warning light meant. By the time we had found the right section of the book, a lot more lights were flashing.

We suddenly realised that we were out of petrol! This has never happened to either of us before. Thankfully both of us had been driving recently, so neither of us felt more responsible than the other. We have since realised that the increments on our petrol gauge are far from equal, but this was a pretty sharp learning curve. The fact that we had only recently swapped over at a petrol station wasn’t lost on us either….

The rain was hammering down, and we discovered that we were smack bang between two petrol stations, with each being 10 miles away. The only option was to hitch hike to one of them. New Zealand is a hitch hiker friendly country (we had already met people along the way who were using this as their main method of travel). Graham decided he would be the one to go to the petrol station while I stayed with the car. He only had to wait for three cars before getting picked up. The driver quickly realised what had happened and was happy to help us out.

They dropped him off and he got a can of petrol. They weren’t in a rush and offered to drive him back to our car, and then to return the can to the petrol station, which was amazingly kind.

I had a tense twenty minute wait, knowing that I should leave the car as it was unsafe to sit in it. The torrential rain made this seem like an unattractive option though! When Graham returned he filled up the car and we were safely on the way, with only the smallest delay. Its safe to say that we won’t be letting this happen again, and since then we have been filling up as soon as we get to half a tank. It was a lucky escape!