New Zealand - Day 4 & 5

Monday May 21, 2018

If I had to pick a favorite day out of the whole trip, this would be it. The morning started with a bit of uncertainty because we weren't sure the road to Milford Sound would be open (due to snow). The website stated the mountain pass would open around 10, so we left the Te Anau Holiday Park around 8 am in hopes that we'd make it to our 11:30 am boat tour.

About 30 minutes into the drive we were stopped at a road entrance gate and the lovely lady informed us that the road would indeed be opened by the time we hit the snowy passes. Yay! On top of that, the forced stop turned out to be an awesome viewpoint. One we couldn't pass up.

I'm having a particularly hard time narrowing down the photos for this post....

So excuse me while I picture vomit all over this entry.

Sorry not sorry.

We continued on what should have been a 2 hour drive, but turned into a 3+ hour drive because we could. not. pass. up. the. picture opportunities!

As you can see, the drive was absolutely awesome. We had a few designated stops, but the majority of the time we pulled over whenever the scenery forced us to do so.

Which happened quite a bit.

I think we left at the perfect time too. We were able to catch the sun just as it was rising over the mountain peaks, which made everything look that much more dreamy.

I LOVED how you could see the frost line on the mountains.

Something that made the mountains and valleys so epic was the extremity of their forms and the the narrowness of the valleys. Eglinton Valley was probably the pinnacle of this phenomenon.

The valleys in that area are so flat and the mountains are so jagged; they look new geographically.

The mountains also don't have any foothills, meaning they're super close and literally shoot straight up from the valley floor.

Mirror Lakes was another pit stop we had planned out. I gotta admit though, I spent the time warming up in the car. After pulling over so many times to take pictures in the frigid temps I was chilled to the bone. John toughed it out though and got the classic "mirror" picture.

After seeing his photo I was annoyed with myself for wimping out and nearly jumped out of the car to have a peek. We had kind of gotten ourselves into a time crunch by this point though and, with future stops ahead in mind, needed to get on the road so we could make our cruise.

We stumbled on a little side road by chance and decided to follow it into the valley a ways to see what we could find.

Again, we were NOT disappointed.

At this point in the drive we were literally craning our necks up and out the windows to see the tops of the mountains.

Pictures (especially iPhone pictures hah) will never do this place justice.

As we climbed farther and farther into the pass we soon entered the snow that had nearly kept us out of the area.

Luckily NZ does a good job of clearly the roads, and we never had any trouble.

Eventually we came to a long, steep, and winding tunnel that took us downhill through the mountain and popped us out the other side.

We continued our steep decent into the valley once more and were greeted with warmer, milder weather, until we eventually reached the sound. We parked our car quickly and were the last to board the cruise ship, having arrived just in time.

We spent the whole cruise up above deck, drinking in the views and maybe people watching a bit as well.

As we neared the end of the cruise the clouds started to roll in.

We feel like we really lucked out and just happened to book the perfect time window when the roads would be open and the weather would be clear. #blessed

The drive back out through the mountains and valleys was just as enjoyable as the drive in, though not quite as pretty. It's hard to beat a sunrise over some mountains. The rest of our day was spent driving the ~4 hours to Queenstown. During which we were treated with more quaint farmland.

And an amazing sunset over Lake Wakatipu.

I couldn't ask for a better way to end the day, except for maybe if there had been an open room available at the Queenstown Holiday Park. It began to rain not long after we reached the city, without any inclination of it letting up. We ended the evening with a yummy home-cooked meal of lamb sausage with ricotta tomato sauce over vegetables, hot showers, and some more Lord of the Rings.

Tuesday May 22, 2018

Tuesday turned out to be a total washout. Literally. The rain never stopped. We drove up to Glenorchy. A 45 minute drive that is supposed to be one of the prettiest in the country (I can't imagine it beating the road to Milford sound though), but with the rain and cloud cover we couldn't really see anything. We made a few stops at some places where scenes from LOTR was filmed, but didn't even get out of the car haha.

The highlight (and only picture we took that day lol) was our lunch. We ordered some Pedro's Lamb and ate it in our car! They do one thing and one thing only, lamb shoulder with rosemary & garlic served with a side of scalloped potatoes for carry-out. mmmm boy was it good!

The rest of the day was spent driving to Lake Wanaka via the Crown Range Road. Again, the drive was supposed to be very scenic but the weather put a damper (literally and figuratively) on it. Once we reached Lake Wanaka we promptly upgraded to a room and spent the rest of the day relaxing and hanging our coats up to dry.