Qtown adventures

Amazing. Incredible. Mind-blowing. Breathtaking. You could find more synonymous adjectives here. I'll include some of my favorite photos here, but definitely check the full album out by clicking here or scrolling down to it in the right hand column. Here's my all-time favorite: That was view that we had from our parking spot at the base of the Coronet Peak ski field, at about 9:30 am, on Sunday. The skiing itself wasn't amazing - the whole area was open due to extensive snowmaking, but was pretty icy - but the fact that we could ski in August, with panoramas like this, made it completely worth it. That and the fact that the exchange rate has plummeted to make the Kiwi dollar just about 67 cents US...this compared to 80 cents just a couple weeks ago.

To get back into some sort of chronological order, we headed out to Queenstown Saturday morning - a four hour drive. We ran into Julia, Katie and Sven there, amazingly just as they came back from a two hour kayaking trip out on Lake Wakatipu. We grabbed lunch at a cool Irish pub (I had an obligatory Guinness, of course) and then headed up to the Skyline Gondola, which takes you up a 1500 ft. vertical rise immediately above the city. We got some spectacular views of Queenstown, the lake and the Remarkables. It was just really unbelievable. Up on top of this, well, mountain I guess, we went luging, which is kind of like an alpine slide, but the track is wide enough to have several people going at once, and you can steer your sled. The races got intense, with 8 of us going around slippery, banked turns.

After a night on the town Saturday - the nightlife in Queenstown is very good - Katie and I split off from the other six in our group (who variously went bungy jumping and kayaking again, something I'll do another time) to meet up with Andrew and his friend Mo to go skiing at Coronet Peak, which is a half hour from the city. As you can see above, it was pretty great up there. We hit the slopes (along with quite a few other people that day) and had a blast, despite the icy conditions. It probably doesn't help that the mountain isn't that tall (5400 ft.) and there's a lot of traffic on it, what with the night skiing and being so close to Queenstown. Regardless, it was fun to get back out on skis again, and especially in August. After skiing all day, we headed back to Dunedin, along with a lovely stop on the road to see the sunset outside Alexandra. After a quick meat pie at the 24 (a delicacy here), we were home and not-so-ready to start the week. And to think I wasn't doing anything this weekend as late as 4 pm on Friday...