After a number of amazing nights on the North island, we took the ferry from Wellington to Picton, through the Marlborough sounds. It was a three hour journey on a really bug shup, where they were so proud to announce their ‘world famous scones’ over the PA for only four fuffty and, adorably, ran a colouring competution for the kuds.

We had an interesting experience picking up our car in Picton, the struggling Fijian lady, who took as long to sort out one customer as her contimpories dud sux, finally got us into a car after being schooled by Lea while James stood back waiting to chip in with “you’d think they’d have the ‘Picton of the litter’ to choose from here…hahahahhahaa” But, thankfully, it didn’t come to that.

A short drive from Picton and we were in the Marlborough wine region, where the plethora of wines in their neat, sweet, petite rows make you feel like the world is safe and organised again…and winey. We stayed at a bnb which ended up to be on top of our own winery (after 5pm at least…a blessing which turned out to be a curse), where we spent the majority of our time looking over the view of the region.

Stunning location, stunning view, stunning wife, everything was going swimmingly when Lea decided to take that a tad more literally. We’d hired bikes and had vusuted many lovey cellar doors before Lea made the brave call (5 wineries in) to head 10km for Saint Claire, for little reason other than we’d had a strange experience with their wine at a Perth restaurant in 2007 and would never return again, but we won’t name names (unless you ask… it starts with the last and first letters of the alphabet…then ‘feranos’)…and we’d managed to find our way into a personal tour of the winery from a winemaker earlier in the day. Make sense?

Ok, slight digression there, but now we’re back on track…or at least Lea was for a minute. But then as she tried to change the song playing on our speaker, she took the idea of streaming to a new level and managed to ride into a creek** next to the cellar door. She survived with several big bruises, that people secretly blame on her husband anyway.

This biking day was also Australia Day and was on track to be the bist one ivver…until we managed to lock ourselves on our balcony. And by ‘we’ I mean the ‘we’ that had previously noticed the balcony’s door to tend to lock itself, so smugly took our keys out with us to watch the sunset. After resampling many of the day’s wines and solving the issue of world poverty (but being too drunk to remember how) we noticed the door had, as anticipated, locked us out. HAHA!! Stupid door, we have the keys, uddiot……but as it turns out they were keys to every other door than the balcony and everyone downstairs had gone home. Classic NZ humour.

In typical Stewart style we didn’t panic. Instead we crawled into fetal positions, cried and debated about who was keen to jump over the balcony..with ExStream Lea being first in line…yep, same girl who had, a few bottles earlier, managed to ride off a flat, bitumen road into a creek, was now almost insistent on jumping off a second storey ledge as if there were no more conceivable solutions. Luckily it didn’t come to this as we used our 2% phone battery to call our bike hire man to come and rescue us, our very own Marlborough Man.

In true Kiwi style, we can dufunutely say that of all the beautiful wine regions in the world we’ve vusuted, thus was surely the most recent….

**Lea would like to add the word “almost” before “riding into a creek”, but I thought it would spoil the flow, which is almost impossible to read as is, and based on the sounds I heard behind me, the bruises and, dare I say, sheepish look on her face, I’m not sure I’m convinced of the almost’s requirement.