Rambling On: West Coast Road Trip

We packed up, fed the sheep a few more handfuls of sheep nuts (looks just like regular old pellets for farm animals), cleaned the kitchen and ate as much of the fruit compote as we could manage. Rolled out at 8 AM and headed for Queenstown. We were taking Alissa to the airport so she could start the long trip home, with a stopover in Sydney. Kissed her goodbye and lost our easy navigation, our cheerful fellow traveler, our best ideas person.
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Detour ... Ever since our children have been old enough to travel, they have traveled a lot. They have been to many more places than Jon and I have ever been, and we are twice as old. Each of them did a semester abroad but they have also taken lengthy trips, sometimes for months at a time. Alissa was last in New Zealand six years ago when she took a trip around the globe -- as her "last" hurrah before medical school. Since then, she has been to Australia five times, Guatemala twice, multiple major cities in Europe, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Hawaii. Anyway, the point of this detour in the story is that we have had the opportunity to travel with each of them and they always take care of us wherever we go because they are so adept at using the technology in their pocket, they aren't afraid to ask questions, and they are basically unflappable. Plus they adapt to our style of travel, which is slower and more comfortable -- no hostels, no overnight trains. They get to spend more money (ours) when they are with us but they are still very frugal. We all buy food at supermarkets and have picnics, we choose housing that is not the most expensive but is the most interesting. In recent years, we have traveled with Rebecca more than the others -- and we haven't traveled with Alissa since 2010 in England.
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We didn't stop in Queenstown but we could see it from a distance, perched along the base of the mountains on the edge of a gorgeous big lake. It was 10:00 in the morning and we wanted to keep moving. We did stop to take pictures many times, and we went to a beach next to a lake with the clearest, most alluring water (kind of cold, stones on the bottom, not sand). We had lunch at a picnic table that was so tall my feet couldn't touch the ground.

The road north hugged some giant lakes, went through rain forests, crossed valleys, became one of those switchback coastal roads overlooking the Pacific Ocean, went back inland, and crossed dozens of one lane bridges. Waterfalls everywhere. The thing is, the landscape changes constantly. Either we are in the mountains or we are in a wide valley or we are on the coast or we are amongst the sheep. It does not stay the same. It feels like Hawaii quite often, with almost no people. There is NO trash on the road, not one tiny piece. We also encountered at least three of those traffic lights that stops one direction for 5 or 10 minutes because the road has washed out or there has been a rockslide. This is the super rainy side of the island. Fox Glacier is the rainiest -- it gets 6 meters of rain a year. People collect rainwater off the roof and that is a dependable source of water year round. It has not rained a drop since we arrived a week ago.

We stopped for an early dinner in a town that is there because of its glacier (Franz Josef) and we went to a restaurant and waited forever to be served because the waiter forgot to put in our order. We wrote postcards and got caught up on our email while we waited. I had a lamb burger which did not taste as yummy as I had imagined. It was a lot like venison, kind of dry. Jon had a more successful bowl of larb gai with a pint of hard cider. Jon did some research on his phone and decided it was totally fine not to leave a tip, so he didn't. Otherwise he would have had to figure out how much to leave, and that seemed way too complicated. Besides, they forgot to feed us for a really long time.

Now we are in a house in one of those flat valley areas, with mountains on the near horizon inland and the ocean about 4 km to the west. This host has a pet calf, a baby deer, a ram and two dogs. Her husband is a professional guide for hunters, and the house is full of hunter evidence. She is friendly and cheerful and welcoming. This is the first house we have been in that looks lived in, which is kind of a relief.