It's Saturday night here and we had a rather slow day. Matt and I were both struggling with allergies last night (which was weird, as we hadn't had any problems up until that point) so we took a Benadryl and zonked out until almost 9:30 this morning! That's way late for us, especially Matt. And then we decided to do laundry since we weren't sure when we would have the opportunity to do it next. So we lounged around and ate breakfast and did some planning while washing/drying our clothes. I also finally got to shave my legs- wohoo! First time I wasn't in a super hurry while showering since being here.
We left our airbnb in Lake Hawea shortly after 1pm and headed towards Queenstown. It's a pretty quick drive, only a little over an hour, so we took our time. We took the Crown route which is more of a scenic route and checked out the views. Here's a picture:
We also stopped in Arrowtown on the way and walked around there a bit. It's a quaint town with lots of little shops and restaurants. We all got a snack there; I got a Nutella and banana crepe. Yum.
Then we got into Queenstown and checked into our hotel. We finally get to stay in a place longer than just one night! We haven't done that since earlier in the North island. We're staying at the Holiday Inn and it's right along the water and we have a nice view from our room. This is a picture I took from our balcony:
Then we weren't really sure what to do, since the weather was cloudy and looked like it could rain, but we didn't want to do nothing. So we went up to the mountain luge place and bought some tickets. We rode the gondola up which was very pretty but it had started to rain so our view was a bit obstructed. Luckily the gondola was enclosed.
Then we got to the top of the gondola and discovered we needed to ride another gondola up to the top of the luge. This one was not enclosed at all, and it was pretty miserable to ride that up while getting cold and wet. We rode the luge down and it was fun but felt a bit out of control since everything was so wet the brakes weren't working very well. Some people totally wiped out and fell off their luge on some turns. Because of that we didn't really want to do it again but we had paid for 5 rides each. We finally talked one of the employees to re-issue our tickets so we could finish our rides another day.
The luge was also different than other lunges/mountains slides I've done before. This one had a wider track where you actually had to steer your way down as opposed to more of an enclosed track that just guided you down. I didn't really like it as much. I felt like I couldn't go as fast since I actually had to steer and slow way down for sharp turns.
So we left there and headed back to the hotel to put on some dry clothes and boom! The sun came out. We got to see a beautiful rainbow.
The rain stopped but it was a cooler day/night. After changing we went back downtown to walk around. There is a ton going on with lots of shops and restaurants and bars. We found an Italian place to eat dinner and it was delicious. It was called "The Cow" and it was on Cow's Lane. We got some yummy garlic bread and I got the spaghetti bolognese. It was my favorite meal of the trip so far, but unfortunately also the most expensive.
We walked around some more and enjoyed the sights and the people watching before turning in for the night. We plan to explore some of the more famous Queenstown activities tomorrow.
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