5.04.2007

New Friends and Milford Sound: Queenstown to Te Anau

Hi, All!

At the time of this writing, it is 9:00am on Saturday May 5th. We woke up well rested after a HUGE day yesterday.

We hit the road from Queenstown as early as we could. Our target was a little town called Te Anau, which is where the highway splits. There's a dead-end highway from here that takes 90 minutes to drive (each way) into the famous Milford Sound.

Listen, we are only going to attach a few pictures here for a couple reasons:

1-we have 150 to show you all when we see you,

2-there are better cameras than ours out there.


On the way to the Sound, we saw a little red station wagon with it's hood up going the opposite direction. We stopped alongside to ask the couple inside if they were okay. Turns out they'd run out of radiator fluid and needed some water. We emptied our bottle into the car and they thanked us and everyone was happy.

After finally making it to the Sound, we took a boat ride and explored all the way back out to the Tasman Sea. The whole tour only took about an hour and a half, but our necks hurt by the end from looking UP for even that short amount of time.

The Chemical Bridge, Baby G's dad, will be happy to note that we stayed ahead of the storm the whole way back to Te Anau. If we had not, the road would've been treacherous as. :)

So in the beginning of a rainstorm, in the dark, after an AMAZING boat ride, with a tank of gas running on love and kisses, we stopped at Bob and Maxine's Backpackers. Bob and Maxine are a wonderful couple who got into the hostelling business only recently. Because of this, everything here was brand new and cozy...they've really thought about everything they'd like to offer travellers, and have made it available. Hence why we're able to write this now - Bob has a free wireless setup for people like us. Good on you, B&M! We wish you the best of luck with the new house and your rugby team - and thanks for having us!

The only other two guests in the whole place were, surprisingly, people we'd met once before - the Canadian couple with the car trouble! So we had a lovely time talking and laughing and sharing kiwi experiences well into the night:

Mark & Amanda - ENGAGED FOUR DAYS AGO!!

That's essentially it for the morning. We'll blog more again when we get the chance. Today should bring us to the Southernmost tip of the country, and we'll stay in a town called Invercargill, the Southernmost city in the world, tonight. Hopefully these last few posts give you a rough idea of what the scenery and colors have been like. We know the camera doesn't do it justice, so we're looking forward to seeing each and every one of you and sharing some more stories over homemade pavlova.

Until next time,

1 comment:

Paul said...

2 days and almost home! Can't wait to see you guys and catch up.