Heading South for the winter

A long drive today as we somehow managed to make a 6 hour trip last ten hours. Certain factors were admittedly beyond our control. First of all there was a great dumping of snow. Good news you might think as our three days planned skiing demands a proliferation of the white stuff. Not so good though when two of your major routes (If you accept that New Zealand has any major routes) are blocked by it. Plan A was to head down to Timaru and see what the weather watch said. Come and check back in an hour said the tourist info lady; doing her best to hide the fact that we did not want to holiday in her town.
"No tourist buses come through here." she moaned with sad resignation to another punter.
"They don't know what they're missing."
Bugger all I thought but when she later told me the roads were now clear(ish) I was immensely grateful and dutifully lied about how disappointed we were we could not have spent more time looking at what Timaru had to offer.
The detour and the wait cost us two hours but when we finally hit Mackenzie country it was worth it. This was our lunch stop at Lake Tekapo. It probably featured in the 1963 Patience Strong "Our Beautiful Empire " Calendar.



The children stood in awe and wonder for five seconds then.......




carried on throwing snowballs at each other.



So lunch stops and snowball fights added to our delay. New Zealand roads can take some of the blame. I'm not sure if we took this view because it was the brilliant view or the only straight bit of road we saw.


We'll give some blame to Tina too. There we were now driving in the dark, with the windy entry into Queenstown with a gorge on our left all the way in. She had stopped us about 20 times for another lake photo another mountain photo. Having been forced to take a twilight shot of large plastic fruit I said enough is enough.



This was the last shot of the day!