A fairly uneventful drive north took us to Christchurch. I say “uneventful” if you don’t include almost driving head on into a fleeing eagle eventful. Talk about gutsy. This thing just sat on the road and stared into the distance as I bore down on it at 100km/h. This sharply reduced to about 30km/h when [...]

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 Time to start the journey back up to Christchurch. Given the weather, we thought it best to make a fairly early start and take it easy, though the drive can be accomplished in a day if needed. We packed up… OK, we chucked everything onto the bed in the back of the van… and set [...]

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 Much better weather today with excellent visibility. However, this was partly due to less snow the night before so the snow blowers were on on the lower slopes. Lou didn’t bother getting the bus up today – her knee was still rather banged up and she was limping – so I handed her board and [...]

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Another day on the mountain, though the visibility was “poor” according to the rather polite board on arrival. The signpost which went up later in the day to say that the Greengates area was closed due to “Poopy Visibility” was closer to the mark. We set off later than yesterday as we both only had [...]

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 Today I froze my beard. Solid. It’s a very weird sensation. You can sort of feel the hairs tightening as the ice forms on each hair and they join together. Winding back the clock, the day had started early as we went to the nearest pub (“47″) to watch the England game. Sod’s Law dictated [...]

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 Didn’t do too much today. Just had a wander round town, got some shopping, went to see The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift (it was pants), ate more popcorn than is safe for a single human being in one sitting and booked three days on the mountain snowboarding. Whoop! 

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 Our last day in Wanaka before driving to Queenstown. We did the usual in the morning – slept in far too late and had breakfast. Then had lunch after a quick visit to the shops and the pricey interwebnet place. On the way out, we stopped off at Have A Shot to do all the [...]

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 Exercise was due today – we’d spent far too much time loafing around recently – so we decided on a walk by Diamond Lake. This is a fairly small lake, by Kiwi standards, located maybe 15km outside of Wanaka. There are a handful of walks around it leading up the surrounding hills, all of which [...]

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 When we woke, the windows were frosted on the inside. After scraping them clear, we could see the scenery that was hidden by darkness when we arrived the previous night. Wow. Mountains covered in snow in all directions and a beautiful blue sky with the sun shining down from it. After two days without showering, [...]

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 Lou was still rather comatose when I woke up at 7:30. The effects of multiple Tuis required a trip to a lavatory… one of the moments when I wished we’d forked out the extra for a van with an on-board toilet! I got dressed and discovered we were parked less than 100 yards from a [...]

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