Wednesday 3rd May
Day of planning and spending money.

First things first. To decide where to go. We were still unsure whether to do the Abel Tasman walk or head south. As the weather was supposed to be good in the north for the next four days after the rain tonight, we were leaning towards Abel Tasman. So into the I-site for some information. We spoke to a DOC lady who was amazing. She gave us a plan A and a Plan B. Heading north along the track and heading south. The linch pin was the timing of the creek crossing at Awaroa which can only be done 1.5 hrs before and 2 hrs after low tide. She gave us all the information and we went away to decide. She also gave us a few other track options which DB had thought of but told us one he wanted to do the night time temp was -9′ last night. So that one was out. It didn’t take us long to decide on Abel Tasman as our next adventure. This required a few purchases. Sleeping bags, saucepans, stove and food. After much deliberation as you can imagine we bought the items and hoped they would fit in our current backpacks as by this time it was after 5 and we were running out of time to buy them. So in the Carpark outside Kathmandu I pulled everything out of DBs bag and tried to put in my sleeping bag, food and a clothes bag from my luggage. It seemed I could manage with our 30 litre bag so we thought DB would manage the 38 litre backpack we already had. So we didn’t buy new hiking bags as well which was good. We will wait to make sure we like multi day hikes and try to get them on special at home.

We then drove from Nelson to Motueka and spent the next few hours getting organised. We finally finished packing and getting organised by about midnight. Wow, what a day. We had to be up and on our way by 8.30am as we had over 20km to hike tomorrow.