I had mentioned a couple posts ago about yesterday's sky diving by Claira, Trixie, and Julian, and that was most certainly the big event of the day. For the purposes of filling in all that we did, however, I'll just briefly mention the bike ride that preceded that. It was another "fine" day, as New Zealanders would describe it. We all gathered at Hawea in the morning after our farm stay the previous night, and began our cycling. It was a fairly easy ride on a quiet road through a valley, with just a few hills to challenge our legs. Some of us biked just the 22 miles to Terras where we all had lunch. The rest, including Pat, Rebecca, Scott, and Lillian (together on the tandem) went another 13 miles to a point where the van was waiting to shuttle us all into Wanaka. Here are a few pictures.
So, after the sky diving extravaganza, this is how we got to Wanaka, a busy little place on the shores of a fair sized lake. As it turned out, there is a huge fair taking place this weekend, and there are thousands upon thousands of people in town from all over New Zealand. After getting to our rooms and cleaning up, most of us walked to town about a half mile away, and looked for a place to grab a bite to eat. Due to the fair, all the restaurants were jammed pack full. We finally found a pizza place on a side street. It was run by Chinese, and any similarity between pizza as any American would recognize one and what we ate last night would be purely incidental. They are both round, and that's about the end of the similarity. Ever heard of barbecue sauce on a pizza? There is no danger that the recipe will make it to America. Oh well, not everything can go well when one travels! The gelato we had afterwards more than made up for the barbecue sauce pizza. We are staying at a place on the edge of town called The Wanaka Homestead. Not new, but quite nice with large rooms. Upon arriving we met a friend of Simon's who has helped in designing this tour. Her name is Paula, and she is originally from Canada. She came here with VBT leading bike tours a few years back. I think Susan and I just missed meeting her by a year os two when we did our first tour here in 2001. Anyway, she fell in love with New Zealand, and in particular with a certain Kiwi fellow, and.....here she is.
Our group has one building to itself, including a large living/dining room. Any rational person would have gone to bed after biking, sky diving and a long walk to and from town. But we have a couple irrational folks (who's names are Scott, Claira, and Julian) who decided to watch a movie in the living room. I had no sympathy for their vacant expressions when we met this morning for breakfast before our flight to Milford Sound. At last! Now I'm only one day behind in my posting, and I might yet get that done before bedtime. Jim
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