He Wants to Race Cars Down a Steep Slope
It’s great to be back and reading the local paper the Recorder: I heard about Mik Muller’s idea to have fun…by racing homemade carts down a steep hill in Turner’s Falls. It’s named, ‘gravity-power’ but the truth is what male can ever resist something that involves rolling fast carts down […]
In the Seafinn’s Cozy Cabin, Enjoyment Inside and Out
When I reviewed our itinerary for this trip, I didn’t realize that we had saved the best part of the trip for last. Nine years ago I did what nearly every visitor to NZ’s South Island does; I took a bus trip down to Milford Sound and went on an […]
Will Mount Aspiring Park Be Mined?
Mount Aspiring is up there in the clouds, this is the glacier as seen from down on the river. Unlike the glaciers up north, this is not actually in danger of melting away, we were told that every year it gets bigger in the winter and smaller in the summer, […]
Getting Online in NZ: "Please Don’t Skype!"
We love New Zealand like an adopted son, but there is one little thing that we also love and miss terribly during our time here. That would be our seamless, fast, cheap and always reliable web connections in the US. People here actually pay for bandwidth…yes, that’s right nobody knows […]
Imagine Her Relief When Her Husband Came Home
We took a stunningly scenic drive down to Manapouri from Queenstown and en route bought the Otago Daily Times, ‘the voice of the south.’ A front page story was about an Auckland woman whose 14-month-old son mistakenly locked her in a closet and she had to endure seven hours while […]
The Kawarau Jet Skims the Beautiful Lake and Rivers
Queenstown is the big Kahuna when it comes to New Zealand tourism. Nearly everyone who comes to the big wide open South Island spends some time here in this adrenaline filled rockin’ little town. We got a chance to see some of the spectacular scenery here from the water, zipping […]
A Million Dollar View from a Wooden Hot Pool
Last night we were picked up by a friendly English gent and taken to Arthur’s Point to one of the newer and nicer attractions of this adrenaline-fueled town by the lake. Instead of bungy jumping or skydiving, we opted for soaking at Onsen Hot Pools, which provide wooden tubs, total […]
The Fuzzy Antlers of Caged Deer at Walter Peak Farm
We boarded the TSS Earnslaw, a vintage steamship built in the early 1900s, for a journey across sparkling Lake Wakatipu this morning, in the company of about 40 mostly German visitors. Despite the tendency for Germans to speak better English than Americans, the group still relied on their translator to […]