Wine tasting and slaughtering a wild boar - just another day in NZ

Forklift lifting 160 pound pig
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Rain, rain, rain.  That's all we've seen in the last 3 days.  We traveled to the Tongariro National Park - a UNESCO dual world heritage site, and all we could see was the road about 40 feet ahead of us.  The rain and fog were so thick that we could have been in rual Minnesota, for all we knew.  Supposedly the mountains and scenery are fantastic, but we'll never know.  The weather forecast for the next 4-5 days wasn't any better so we made our way to Napier, in the heart of wine country.

Mission Winery near Napier
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Napier was completely destroyed in an earthquake sometime in the 1930's and then nearly completely rebuilt, so a majority of the buildings are in Art Deco style which has made the town famous.  That and their large amounts of wine.  The downfall to Napier (besides the rain) was that it was about as difficult to navigate as the Bermuda Triangle.  I was pretty sure Brian and I were going to come to blows while trying to locate our campground.

On our second night in the area, Brian found us a place to stay out in the country with dogs and cats and sheep.  It was a backpackers place called the Farmhouse Lodge owned by a Kiwi couple named Dawson and Kerry.  Dawson had recently killed a huge wild boar and it was laying in a walk-in fridge waiting to be butchered.  Of course Brian and I wanted to observe, because how often do you get to see that happen?  So after a few hours tasting wine in the area, we went back to the lodge, had dinner, and watched them cut the skin off mr. piggy.  I've never seen a tougher woman than Kerry - she manhandled mr. piggy like it was nothing.

Mission Winery, once again
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The weather forecast looks iffy for tomorrow as well - maybe we'll stay in this area a bit longer.  Maybe not.  We're just taking it one day at a time....

Anne