December 3, 2022

December 3, 2022

Lying in bed, looking out my window last night, I saw stars again. I can’t believe how excited I now get for clear skies. I saw Orion again the first time up, but the second time the constellation Centaurus was center stage. Its super-bright star alpha-Centauri is our closest neighbor. I learned that as a child watching Lost in Space. After waking up, I was happy seeing a colorful sunrise. Aimee spoiled it when she announces that Air New Zealand cancelled our flight this morning from Queenstown to Auckland. Darn! Here we go again. We tried to book the one thirty minutes later but we were too slow. We got two of the last seats on a late morning flight.

We packed up and checked out and waited for the airport bus outside our hotel. The first never came. Almost an hour later one showed up. Today is not starting out so well. We made it to the airport and boarded our flight without issue. Immediately the baby in front of us screamed for the first ten minutes. Most of the people we have encountered in New Zealand seem to be young with children.

Our bad luck today seemed to end when we finally took off. The baby calmed down and we had clear skies for almost the first hour. We had great views of the glacial blue lakes we visited. The grandeur of the Southern Alps was before my eyes. I even saw a cloudless Mt Cook/Aoraki.

When we landed in Auckland, we took the shuttle to pick up our rental car. We got an unplanned upgrade but found the car has lots of quirks that took getting used to. Since we are late, we had to scuttle our tour plans and we instead drove four hours south to the the town of Turangi in the center of the north island. We had a hamburger dinner at the local pub and then went shopping for snacks at the grocery next door.