Sunday 8th February 2026

Many people think that we eat fancy food the whole time we are on holidays. Not only would we be broke if that was the case, but we’d also be extremely unhealthy!

Breakfast is an easy meal to keep cheap and simple. While I do love a good breakfast out (who can pass up on a good eggs benny or even better, shakshuka!) eating something simple in a hotel is very easy to do. If we are travelling locally in Australia, we usually take bowls, cups and cutlery and a ‘brew kit’ (coffee/tea/sugar/UHT milk) so that we can easily make our own. Even if travelling further afield we often choose motels with basic cooking amenities so that we can at least make our own breakfast.

New Zealand is surprisingly more expensive for food than in Australia. For example, a litre of milk is about $5, a dozen decent eggs at least $12, the apricots I got a couple of days ago were $10/kg (even in season) and the small packet of Weetbix we bought at Woolworths on Saturday was $5.80.

It is still, however, cheaper to eat breakfast in than out, so for the last few days we have both had Weetbix and a cup of tea for breakfast. My preference is three Weetbix with cold milk and no sugar. Dave’s is 2.5 Weetbix with hot milk and a little sugar… thankfully there is a microwave for Dave to heat his milk in.

Sunday was the day to travel from the West Coast to the East Coast. We left Westport at around 10am, got to Nelson in time for lunch, then spent the afternoon driving to Blenheim, via Havelock.

Nelson is the oldest city on the South Island and with a population of about 60,000 is similar in size to Wagga Wagga. Like Wagga it has all the usual offerings of shopping centres, fast food outlets and tourist attractions. Unlike Wagga it also has a lovely coastline aspect and one of the reasons we especially wanted to stop there was for the Nelson Classic Car Museum. It has an amazing collection of more than 150 iconic cars – from a 1903 Cadillac to classics of the 1950s including Vauxhalls, Studebakers, Triumphs and Buicks, through to Jaguars and Ferraris. It also had quite a few from the 60s and the 70s that brought back fond memories for both Dave and me. I especially liked the orange P76 – very similar to the one a friend of mine had in the 70s. I remember everyone referring to them as duds! Dave’s favourite was the 1962 Studebaker Hawk, which coincidentally we had seen one of parked an hour or so earlier and Dave had a good yarn to the driver!

After we left the Car Museum we headed towards Havelock. Havelock has a thriving local aquaculture industry and is famous for being the Greenshell Mussel Capital of the World! Even though I’d already enjoyed a lovely mushroom crepe and salad at the car museum, I couldn’t pass up on having Mussels in Havelock, so sat down to a delicious bowl of mussels freshly steamed in a garlic, white wine and cream sauce. Yum!

By the time we got to Blenheim, had a quick look around and checked into our hotel it was dinner time. We were both pretty tired by this stage, so I foolishly decided Dave could choose dinner – DoorDash delivered Burger King which he thoroughly enjoyed, and I did not!

Not a great end to the day – but everything else was fabulous!

Nest stop Picton 🙂