Adventure Airport - Picton Airport

I knew we were in for an experience when collecting our Hertz car in Blenheim the good lady who handled the paperwork informed us there was no Picton Airport and that really it was Blenheim airport. I was pretty certain that there were two airports not one and that she was wrong. However, it is pretty difficult to argue with a local but since Blenheim airport is only a hop, step and a jump from the Hertz office and on the way to the Cloudy Bay Winery we could check it.

I was right. One up for the tourists. I was to discover that very few people know of Picton airport and those that do call it something like Kaiwakara and certainly not Picton. Having resolved as far as we were concerned I now had to make sure that Hertz knew where I was going to drop the car. I won’t trouble the reader with this histoire of our attempts to inform Hertz. Suffice it to say that multiple trips were required to get this bit of information over to the local Hertz office and oh yes, to inform them that while we had a new car with only 48km on the clock it decided that it would not start from time to time, once inconveniently in the middle of junction, which caused a passing New Zealand driver to stop and advise me it was not a good place to park!

Back to Picton Airport. We checked its location and decided that we would have to leave a little early to ensure we found it. We found it with ease, though it is not immediately obvious where the terminal buildings are though, actually, we found them with out problems.

What we had here was the next step up from a grass strip and hut. The waiting room was a small homely room with the check in desk a hole in the wall with the weighing machine in the doorway just to the left. In good weather the garden with seats and tables and wonderful roses doubles as an alternative waiting room. The runway is a relatively short and narrow piece of tarmac and I am not sure I spotted any runway lights. Actually, I think the airport terminal is really someone’s house.

Clearly the airport is used frequently because there were a number of cars in the car park and Sounds Airways must do 5 or 6 flights a day between Picton and Wellington and vice versa. Booking in is everything the experienced air traveller craves for. No hassle with bags, no security checks , no x-ray machines, and no long walk to the gate. What gate? It is a 5 barred metal gate that the aircraft pulls up to and and embarking is done when the pilot says “OK folks lets go” after he has finished assisting the loading of the cases.