An American, A Broad: August 2011

Ha ha ha!!!
I bet you thought I'd forgotten all about this blog! Boy, is the joke on you!
I haven't forgotten, nor have I forgotten that there are two more honeymoon-centered posts left: Queenstown and Auckland.
So, I'm not going to bore you with the same old life/school/work excuses, I'm just going to dive straight in to Queenstown. Won't you join me?

Queenstown was our longest stop on the NZ leg of our honeymoon. We arrived on December 30th and left on January 2nd, and in hindsight we probably could have done one less day there, at least. Don't get me wrong: Queenstown was gorgeous and fun, but it was also the one place where all the teens and twenty-somethings from the South Island convened to celebrate the New Year. It was heaving with people - even by NZ standards - which, by this point in our trip, was a little too much for our tired, old, matronly selves to stomach. And speaking of stomachs! Ours were starting to play tricks with us. It may have had something to do with many of our meals being eaten on the go, or too many mussels (yes, it is possible), but neither of us were feeling too hot for our last few days in NZ (just wait till we get to Auckland).
Unfortunately, this meant that we basically slept through the New Years festivities. It's not such a big deal in general, except that our hostel was perched high on a hill overlooking the harbor of Lake Wakatipu, where Queenstown's fireworks were set to go off. It was the perfect vantage point - if only we had gotten up out of bed (in the interest of full disclosure: I take the blame. We were awoken by the fireworks, but I was the spoilsport who didn't actually want to get up out of bed. Mike was willing to try, but I just couldn't muster the motivation).
The following morning, however, we did gather strength to take the gondola up to Bob's Peak, where we watched people luging and paragliding, and then we went ziplining. But not before running into the same child and parents who terrorized us on our train ride to Christchurch!!! In fact, this was the third time we had encountered him: the first on the train, the second at a rest stop on the way to Milford Sound, and the third here in Queenstown. But would it be the last...?

So here we are on the way to Queenstown: