KEY POINTS:
The drive north from Wellington presents a Hobson's choice.
There's the coastal route with its view of Kapiti Island and headline-grabbing accident statistics. First, though, you have to negotiate an obstacle course of road works, seemingly as permanent as the Great Wall of China. And when the ocean disappears from view, you enter a gridlocked strip of garish retail, the growth engine for the mushrooming beach communities of Raumati, Paraparaumu, and Waikanae.
The alternative route follows the Hutt River to the Rimutakas, a crossing that requires a clear head and a steady hand on the wheel.
Over the hill lies the Wairarapa, sometimes described as New Zealand's best-kept secret although the validity of this claim presumably decreases with every airing.
Few of the towns along State Highway 2 are likely to distract the traveller. Masterton seems like a bigger version of Carterton and Featherston - not a glittering distinction. Eketahuna and Waipukurau are names to conjure with but the places leave an impression of somnolent insularity.
Pahiatua, the base from which Sir Keith Jacka Holyoake plotted Federated Farmers' takeover of New Zealand, has its Polish Memorial marking the site of the refugee camp in 1944 and - less evidently - its mounted yellow Harvard, a Second World War training aircraft.
Woodville has its wind farm, Dannevirke its billboard Viking and Mangatainoka the Tui Brewery. According to the TV ads, the brewery is entirely staffed by "gorgeous women" who cool off after work by frolicking in the Mangatainoka River.
In advertising's alternative universe, where the idiotic Goldstein passes for a high-powered American banker, the premise that this hamlet could be awash with gorgeous woman probably wasn't seen as that much of a stretch.
An exception is Greytown whose olde worlde B&Bs and bustling cafes have made it a stop on the wine and food trail. Handily situated to absorb the spill-over from Martinborough, Greytown bears a passing resemblance to Ponsonby with the bumper-to-bumper caffeine-dependents jostling for parking space on the main drag.
Spending our first night in Hawke's Bay in a cottage overlooking Waimarama beach seemed like a good idea when we were browsing on-line. The reality though was yet another reminder that the tourism industry still harbours quick buck merchants for whom the concepts of service and value for money are as obscure as existentialism and who operate on the basis that there's a sucker born every minute.
Lawn Cottages in East Clive, where we spent the rest of our stay, was at the opposite end of the spectrum: superb accommodation in a lovely setting presided over by genial host Shona Walding, daughter of the late Labour Party stalwart Joe Walding.
In his valedictory speech to Parliament, David Lange paid tribute to this remarkable figure, at various times a wheeler-dealer, member for Palmerston North, Cabinet minister, and High Commissioner in London, describing him as "my comforter, my minder, my uncle, my philosopher, the person who told me whether I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing".
Having lived for 10 years in a modernist jewel of an apartment building in Sydney, I'm not entirely persuaded by Napier's art deco pretensions and much of its sea frontage is distressingly ugly, even by New Zealand standards. Perhaps Havelock North, not so long ago a glorified retirement village where patrons of sidewalk cafes had to keep an eye out for elderly motorists whose parking technique had deserted them, will, in due course, become Hawke's Bay's centre of gravity.
In between feeding the ducks at Lawn Cottages and sampling some of the Bay's excellent vineyard restaurants, we attended the national under-17 cricket tournament.
In some ways, the further a child advances in his or her sporting endeavours, the less stressful it is for the parents although not in the case of the prominent Auckland lawyer who, unable to watch his son at the crease, was last seen striding towards the horizon in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Detachment is made easier by Invisible Parent Syndrome which afflicts teenage boys involved in team sport, preventing them from noticing their parents at point-blank range and triggering confusion or panic when spoken to by said phantoms.
There's a theory that IPS is induced by coaches scarred by encounters with clingy or pushy parents or who've based their approach on the "give me the infant and I'll give you the gold medallist" methodology employed by communist nations during the Cold War.
The good news is that IPS responds well to pizza.
