On the coastal highway

As our chilli-red Ford Falcon, packed full of a family of five, bags, lollies, and enough cassette tapes to last five hours, wound its way through the Hundalees, that familiar stir in my stomach appeared.

The feeling of this cocktail of motion sickness and the excitement that we were halfway to our destination will always stick with me.

While other families were tripping off to Disneyland or bound for the European winter, the Stretch family was on a familiar holiday route to Blenheim to see the matriarch of our family, my grandmother.

There was nothing fancy about Nana’s house. Three of us shared a room with beds from the ’50s; the others opted for the sunroom or, in some cases, a tent in the backyard. But, despite its simplicity and Nana’s food for fuel, not taste, we loved it.

We loved it because we were together and because it had that undeniable sense of a Kiwi holiday, one of the aspects that makes this place so great.

You don’t have to travel for thousands of miles to make lifelong memories. There are many great destinations that make up the identity of the great New Zealand holiday. In this issue, we travel to the far away near.

We stop by Hanmer Springs for a quick dip into the attraction’s history and find out where it is heading. We hop in the car and continue north-west to Abel Tasman National Park, chatting to the Wilson family, who have welcomed guests to the spot for generations, and we head back down south to Lake Tekapo/Takapō, where an exciting race is taking runners around the stunning scenery.

Bon voyage,

Liam Stretch Editor