A few months ago, I drafted a post about our upcoming trip to New Zealand in November 2019.

If you check out that post, you will see the impossibly long list of things that we were considering for this visit.

Here is my list from that post, but rearranged in order of what we thought we might be able to accomplish in a week.

• Farmer’s Markets in Queenstown and Wanaka
• The Queenstown Gondola
• Do either a Doubtful Sound overnight cruise or a Milford Sound overnight cruise.
• Visit Arrowtown a quaint historic gold mining village
• Central and North Otago for  Wine Tasting
• Lord of the Rings Tour
• TS Earnslaw Steamer in Queenstown
• Take a half day lake cruise and island walk with Eco Wanaka Adventures
• See the world’s smallest penguins in their natural environment in Oamaru
• Visit New Zealand’s only castle, Larnach Castle situated on the picturesque Otago Peninsula
• Encounter history at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum
• Visit Olveston Historic Home And take a 1 hour guided tour of Olveston Historic House providing a glimpse of life in the early 1900s.

The closer we got to our trip, we even added a couple of other items, such as visiting a local Lions Club meeting or a Soroptimist International meeting to find out what these organizations do in New Zealand.

The trip started out as planned. We flew from Sacramento to Los Angeles and then boarded our flight to Auckland. From their we boarded our flight to Queenstown on the South Island. This is where our plans were changed. First of all, we try to never check bags, but the airline insisted that we check our two carry on bags. Unfortunately, we could not land in Queenstown because of the strong winds and diverted to Christchurch. Our options were to take a bus, provided by Air New Zealand to Queenstown or fly back to Auckland for another try for Queenstown later in the evening.

We opted for the bus tour because we had enough time in the air, and because we were only visiting for a week, we did not plan to see anything north of Lake Wanaka where we were staying. Now we would be able to see Mt. Cook and all of the beautiful country between Christchurch and Queenstown. The only real problem was that we needed to get to Queenstown before the car rental place closed at 10:00 pm or we would be stranded an hours drive from Lake Wanaka with no wheels and no place to stay the night, and of course, no suitcases since they made us check our bags.

To make the long story shorter, we did have a great tour on our way to Queenstown. It seemed that we stopped at every wide spot in the road for photo ops, which was great, but I was worried that we would not get to Queenstown in time.  I called the car rental place regularly to let them know that we were still on our way, and hoped to get there before they closed. I even offered to pay the clerk to wait for us, but she did not say that she would.

Well, luck was with us. We did arrive at the airport in Queenstown with about 10 minutes to spare. We quickly raced to the car rental counter by 5 minutes before 10:00 pm and were able to get our rental car. And as luck would have it, our plan made a safe return and we were able to pick up our baggage and head to Lake Wanaka.

Wow, were there a lot of switchbacks on that trip from Queenstown to Lake Wanaka. It was worth it though. This place is beautiful. It is like they combined the Rocky Mountains, the Sacramento Valley from the 1950s and the fiords of Alaska or Norway, all in one island. If we had really know how beautiful it was, we would have booked all of our three weeks here and would not have split our time with Australia. Nothing against Australia, but we needed the full 3 weeks in New Zealand as well as another several weeks in Australia.

We only managed the first 5 things on our list, along with a visit with the Soroptimist International in Gore, which means that we do have to come back to finish the list.

Below is a few of the photos of the fun places and activities we enjoyed in New Zealand.