Elizabeth's Blog

We're spending the week in Nelson, which is on the northwest corner of the South Island. It's desperately dry here and right before we arrived a farmer plowing his field hit a stone and started a fire. It's been burning for days now and has become the largest forest fire in NZ history. We could see the helicopters taking water to fight the fire as we drove into the city. Our motel is right in the heart of the city so we're in walking distance to most of what we'd like to see. This is the third city where we've found a convenient Countdown grocery store so we haul our shopping bags down every couple of days after we've meal planned. NZ is an expensive place to eat out 3 meals a day for more than month so we use our kitchens which have been well equipped at every stop. It's interesting to see the difference in grocery offerings. Boysenberry yogurt and ice cream is popular here and Tom has had to switch from cherry to pomegranate juic...

A popular spot to retire in New Zealand is Nelson, on the northwest corner of the South Island. Since we have a rental car we decided to take in some scenery and drive from Queenstown to Nelson taking the coastal highway. There were all sorts of warnings online about how difficult the trip was and it is an estimated eleven hour drive so we decided to break it up into two days. I assumed most of it would be like the California coastal road, twisting through the mountains To get to the coast we had to backtrack some so we again wound through the mountains to Wanaka and headed south until we could finally turn west and find the coast. It was a typical drive through the New Zealand alps over narrow roads without breakdown lanes and with scant railings. It was a beautiful trip for me, however, since I didn't have to keep my eyes on the road every second. Once we were on the west side of the mountains we were in rain forest. The road cut through solid mountain rock that was cover...

After a 3 hour return trip over the Tasman we've come in for a landing in Queenstown, a lake resort city of about 16,000 on New Zealand's south island. Our condo here has a full laundry, kitchen and the living room with a gas fireplace. It's going to cool off later in our stay so we may get to use it. Queenstown is built on a huge alpine lake that's kind of “Z” shaped and although the lower part of the southern alps is visible and it snows here in the winter, it doesn't get really cold. Most of the time winter temperatures are in the 30's and there's rarely snow cover. Between the front of our unit and the road there's a hedge of New Zealand mountain flax that's just out of flower. There are dozens of wilted flowers on each one – the display must have been fabulous just last week. A lot of our Queenstown stay has been devoted to loafing since we're here to relax rather than tour. But we did find time to go to the movie in Wanaka. Since there ...