We started our second day in New Zealand in the small town of Omarama. We packed up and left our little cabin at the holiday park headed toward the local airfield and The Pink Glider Cafe to get some breakfast.
Omarama has some unique geographic features that make it a world-class destination for gliding (flying an unpowered aircraft). So in addition sitting down to a nice breakfast, we were hoping we would be able to see some gliders being towed aloft while were were at the café.
We somehow got up, ready, and packed too early, as the café wasn’t quite ready when we arrived, but they let us settle in at a table anyway. We did our best to keep Izzy occupied with coloring and playing with some of the outdoor toys that were available to guests.
Tossing the old pigskin rugby ball around. (Would you believe there doesn’t seem to be a good slang term/nick name for the ball used in a rugby match?)
When we eventually did get our food and coffee, everything was surprisingly good. More delicious, higher quality, and better presented than you would expect from a little airfield café in the States.
After breakfast, we got back into the car without having spotted any gliders on the ground or in the sky. Sad. But we had to get going, as we had a glacier to find!
As we drove towards the Tasman Glacier Viewpoint, the scenery was spectacular. The highway follows the shoreline of long and narrow Lake Pukaki, which is fed by glacial melt, giving its water extraordinary color. The road was interesting as well, with many one-way bridges to navigate.
After arriving near the viewpoint, we had a short but steep hike uphill to the viewing area which gave us an awesome vantage of the surrounding area. In the distance we could see shrinking Tasman Glacier, which was melting into Tasman Lake, which flowed downhill via the Tasman River to Lake Pukaki. It was cool to see how the water changed color as it flowed along. We could also see the snow-covered Southern Alps to our north, west, and south.
Luckily it wasn’t too cold and the hike had warmed us up, because it was quite windy up at the viewpoint.
Check out that hair!
After we got our photos and fill of the view, we started our hike back down.
New Zealand - Tasman Glacier Viewpoint Decent - Timelapse
Back on the road, we headed east toward the coast. On the way, we stopped at Blue Lake Eatery on the shore of Lake Tekapo for lunch. We’re not pizza snobs, but we weren’t sure what to expect from a Kiwi pie. However, we were impressed once again by New Zealand’s culinary offerings.
As we approached our destination for the night, Google Maps gave us a “shortcut” into Timaru. We ended up on some narrow farm lanes, which serpentined back and forth, following the curves of the steep hills in the area. It was an amazing departure from the long, straight, flat country roads back in Nebraska. I was a little scared we would run out of pavement, find ourselves face-to-face with a big piece of farm equipment, or discover that Google had sent us the wrong direction, but we made it to town without a hiccup. Despite the mild anxiety, I had quite a bit of fun with the back roads exploration, even though our automatic Toyota Corolla didn’t have the most exciting driving dynamics.
Once in town, we checked into another holiday park cabin, and then headed back out to do a bit more exploring. Timaru ended up being our least favorite city on the trip. It felt quite industrial, and not terribly inviting. There’s apparently a colony of Little Blue Penguins that live in the bay, but despite our best efforts to find them, they eluded us.
For whatever reason that evening, the restaurants in town didn’t look very appealing, so we popped into the local PAK’nSAVE grocery store to find something for dinner as well as breakfast the next morning. At first, we were a bit disappointed at not finding a restaurant, but then we remembered how much fun it is to visit international grocery stores. If you are ever visiting a new country, make it a point to stop by a grocery store, even if to just wander around.
Now the US and New Zealand are quite similar, so the grocery store experience there was very familiar. But there are some small differences that are exciting to spot.
Dangerous un-chilled eggs!Cooked meat ends? I prefer mine tartare.
We passed on the eggs and meat ends, but did find some dinner to bring back to our cabin, a local bottle of wine to wash it down, and some breakfast and snacks for the next day.
We return again to telling the story of our trip to New Zealand in excruciating detail. Last time, I kicked things off by describing our adventure getting to the other side of the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson may have once said, “Its the not the Destination, It’s the journey.” I’m not certain I believe that is an accurate quote, as I couldn’t find it in the essay it is supposed to be from, and I would hope that a noted American essayist such as Emerson would have a better grasp of contractions and capitalization. Nevertheless, if it was said by someone, they were certainly not speaking about getting to New Zealand from the United States with a 3-year-old. However, I think the quote could apply to a drive across the length of New Zealand.
Our route up the south island, which was only half the trip.
Our planned route included driving between 13 overnight stops on our way from Queenstown to Auckland, and taking the ferry from the south island to the north island, with plenty of adventures along the way.
We started our trip in Arrowtown, New Zealand, a short drive away from the airport in Queenstown. After getting checked into our motel for the evening, we walked a few blocks downtown and had dinner outside at a local pub. You can’t beat dining al fresco in January! The food and drink were excellent, which we learned is standard across the country. You just can’t get a bad meal. There were also plenty of good vegetarian options for Charlotte, which is also normal for New Zealand.
Izzy was excited to have made it to New Zealand, and dinner.
Unfortunately, all our travel finally caught up with Charlotte, and she had to leave dinner a little early to recover. Izzy and I stayed out to finish our food, and braved a little rain to explore the town and find an ATM.
When Izzy is older, she won’t know what this is.According to Izzy, if you find a stick while it is raining out, it is a “rain stick” and you must jump on it.
We then called it an early night and got plenty of rest, other than being awoken by the sound of sirens coming through the open window (lots of places in New Zealand don’t have air conditioning) sometime around 2AM. Being from the Midwest, we assumed it was some kind of bad weather, but the skies were clear, so we went back to sleep, hoping there wasn’t an impending earthquake or volcano eruption. In the morning, the motel owners told us the siren was a call to assemble the local volunteer fire department. I guess the Kiwis don’t have pager technology yet.
After packing up and checking out the next morning, we drove just a few blocks and grabbed breakfast at a cute little café just down the block from last evening’s pub. Just like dinner the night before, the food and drinks were impressive and delicious. Charlotte claims it was the best French toast she’s ever had.
After breakfast, we ambled through downtown Arrowtown, which was a little touristy, but still fun. We then visited the Lakes District Museum & Gallery which provided a lot of information about the European settlement of the historic mining town. Once we wrapped up at the museum, we rented (or hired as the Kiwis would say), a big plastic pan and a trowel and walked down to the shallow river behind the museum to try our luck panning for gold.
Downtown Arrowtown.Ready for prospectin’!The river was slow and shallow, making panning easy.
Sadly, we found no nuggets or even flakes of gold, but it was still fun playing in the river. After our attempt at prospecting, it was time to hit the road.
Because of my car rental booking mixup, we first had to drive back to the Queenstown airport, to return our single day car rental, and pick up our 13 day rental. We swapped our luggage from a Toyota Corolla hatchback to a Toyota Corolla sedan. Then we set out on our first day on the road in New Zealand. We immediately hit some challenging driving, as we found some very winding roads and even climbed switchbacks up a mountain. I would have loved to aggressively tackle the New Zealand roads a fun car like my old Miata or BMW, but the rental Corolla and possibility of carsick passengers led me to try and drive as smoothly as possible. Driving on the left side of the highway for the first time also encouraged me to take it easy.
Despite the driving challenges, we made it to our first destination, the Wanaka Lavender Farm, without incident.
In addition to having row upon row of gorgeous purple flowers, the Wanaka Lavender Farm has plenty of other attractions. There are honey bee hives, a few different flower gardens, some Instagram-ready props to pose with in the fields, exotic breeds of farm animals, a tea room, and of course, a gift shop.
We hadn’t stopped anywhere for lunch, so we immediately sat down for a spot of lavender tea along with some ice cream. Then we wandered through the farm, taking in all the gorgeous flowers and attractions.
Izzy enjoyed the chocolate lavender ice cream.The lavender flowers were teeming with honey and bumble bees.There were fuzzy pigs,and fuzzy cows and sheep. (Also fuzzy chickens, but we didn’t get a good picture.)This purple tractor was Izzy’s favorite thing at the farm.
Eventually, we wrapped things up at the lavender farm and got back on the road. On our way to our motel for the night, we made a couple more stops. Once to visit a playground and grab some cold drinks, and another just to take in the view.
In New Zealand they call this a “flying fox” and they’re fairly common at playgrounds. Izzy was too scared to really enjoy them.Lindis Pass. I just learned that those clumps of grass are called tussocks.
Our stop for the night was in Omarama. We were staying at a holiday park, or what we in the States would call an RV park. Of course, we didn’t have a caravan (RV) to stay in, but the park also had motels (cabins) available. We ended up staying in quite a few of these holiday parks during our trip. First of all, for some reason it was surprisingly difficult to find standard hotel rooms in New Zealand that sleep more than two. They do things differently down there, and there just aren’t very many big chain hotels and when booking I didn’t see any rooms that come with two queen beds. We saw a single Hilton hotel in the middle of our trip, and I think that was the only American brand we spotted. Second, many of these parks come with some nice amenities, such as playgrounds and laundry facilities. Third, as fulltime RVers, who spend all of our time living in RV parks here in the States, we were curious to see what they looked like on the other side of the world. Things weren’t terribly different, but there were no motorhomes only towed rigs, and the caravans and their tow vehicles were smaller than you’d see in the US. We never saw anything like our F-350 and 36 foot fifth-wheel. And finally, I was able to sign up for a membership with a chain that had holiday parks in a lot of the cities we visited, which saved us a little bit of money.
Our cabin or “motel” for the night.
After checking in at the holiday park, we headed out to get some dinner. We first tried a café that also does sheep shearing demonstrations, but found out they’re not open in the evenings, so we went to the only other restaurant in town, which was a bar called Boots & Jandals. The word jandals is a Kiwi portmanteau of “Japanese” and “sandals”, as apparently the Japanese were the ones to introduce the country to the concept of what I would call flip-flops. Omarama is a pretty small farming/ranching town, so the name of the bar is to let people know they are okay to come as they are, whether from the fields in their boots or in their jandals on a summer day off. According to the beer I checked in there on Untappd, we didn’t actually see anyone wearing boots.
Once again, the food was delicious and of much higher quality than you’d expect from a fairly dive-y rural bar, and there were solid vegetarian options available.
After we had checked into our little cabin, we found out that the toiletries provided in New Zealand aren’t always enough, and we didn’t have any shampoo or conditioner. So while we waited for our food at the bar, Charlotte ran across the street to a little store to pick some up. Earlier in the day, we had passed on buying fancy lavender products at farm, because we thought they were too expensive, but it turns out that small bottles of Pantene from a small store in rural New Zealand are just as expensive.
Our bellies full and our haircare product needs met, we headed back to the holiday park and after a quick trip to the playground, we called it a night. Not too bad for our first full day in the country!
The playground had bounce pillow! I’m sure the Kiwis have a funny name for these things, but I never learned it.
Having decided it wasn’t crazy enough to quit our jobs and sell everything to live in an RV and travel the US, last year we decided to take our 3-year-old on a trip to the other side of the world.
Once Charlotte and I started traveling somewhat regularly a few years ago, New Zealand has been on our list of places to visit someday. That “someday” became January 2020, when American Airlines had an amazing and very short-lived sale on award flights purchased with frequent flier miles. Excited about the freedom afforded by our new lifestyle (we were a little over a month in at the time), we snagged tickets for all three of us.
So, we got up early on a Tuesday morning in Cottonwood, Arizona, and didn’t go to bed again until the Arizona equivalent of 2 AM on Thursday morning in Arrowtown, New Zealand.
Our flights.
Here’s how we got there.
We were staying at an RV resort in Cottonwood, so we had to pack up our rig, tow it over and then back it into a tight space in the park’s storage lot. We then drove our truck about two hours south to the Phoenix airport and dropped it off in long term parking. Once at the airport, we grabbed a drink at the new American Express Centurion lounge, and then caught our flight to Los Angeles.
Izzy likes to race the moving walkways in airports.
We had a long layover at LAX, so we wandered around quite a bit. The new international terminal is very modern and even has a cool, if dirty, play area for kids.
Now you’d think that a flight to New Zealand, located 6,500 miles away would depart from that same international terminal, but apparently American Airlines needs a geography lesson, as we had to head back to the much less pleasant domestic terminal for our flight. After we got some much-needed play time in, we made did a lot of walking between terminals, to grab dinner, hit up a lounge, and finally to board our flight.
It was a good thing we got our steps in because we were then stuck in a tight economy class seat for about 13 hours. Izzy did well, sleeping most of the way. Charlotte and I rested our eyes but couldn’t manage to actually nod off. Charlotte and I have been fortunate enough to make our last few overseas trips up in business class, so that made the small, barely reclining seats, questionable food, and lack of service just a bit more painful.
At least someone was comfy.
We landed at the Auckland, New Zealand airport without incident, then proceeded with our well-rested, but still out of sorts three-year-old to immigration. Moving slowly, we were among the last people from our plane to arrive and stood in a long line to enter the country. There were automated passport control kiosks available to citizens of many countries, but apparently, the signage needs to be better because almost no one was taking advantage of them. Instead, everyone was waiting in line in front of us. Sadly, we were ineligible to use the kiosks with Izzy, because I guess they know how families with young children are the best at waiting patiently in long lines for some exciting bureaucracy. But eventually, we made it to the front and were admitted to New Zealand.
We were entering the home stretch of our travels, but still had another plane to catch. Before our flight, we grabbed some lunch at the airport McDonald’s. Now this isn’t exactly the best way to experience a new culture, but when traveling with a 3-year-old you make some compromises. At least they had a veggie burger on the menu for Charlotte, a happy meal for Izzy, and something “exotic” for me. I ordered a Georgie Pie, which was a savory steak pie. Not bad, and I’m glad I tried it, but wouldn’t order it again.
I had to provide my own utensil. Maybe you’re supposed to pick it up like a sandwich?
After lunch, we figured out how to recheck our luggage, and got to take in some sunshine, and fresh air (at least as fresh as an airport can get) as we walked from the international to the domestic terminal.
We immediately spotted an “RV house” at the airport! It was a coffee stand.
New Zealand isn’t a huge country but has many amazing sites to see. Things are quite spread out, so we figured the best way to see them all would be to rent a car. We decided to immediately fly from Auckland down to Queenstown on New Zealand’s south island. From there, we would rent a car, and make our way north, crossing the Cook Strait that separates the north and south island on a ferry, then resuming our drive north until we reached Auckland and flew back home. This would give us the freedom to travel at our own pace and select our sites.
I reserved a car with Avis for our whole trip at a great rate but made a small mistake when booking it. The reservation didn’t start until the day after we arrived in Queenstown. Time zones are hard and crossing the international date line is harder. And all our other reservations worked out! You can’t win ’em all. Anyway, you’d think it would be a simple matter to adjust the reservation online or over the phone. But renting a car is like casting a spell. In order to get a good rate, you need to speak the magic words or discount codes. Trying to adjust the reservation by simply adding an extra day removed the discounts for the entire reservation and would have cost more than a thousand dollars. Luckily, I managed to notice the missing day before we got to the Avis counter in Queenstown. I was somehow able to get online in the Auckland airport (free airport wifi is almost always awful, and New Zealand internet is pretty bad in general) and booked a single day rental car with National. I never managed to get a confirmation, but they had a reservation for me at the counter. So with a quick glance at my American driver’s license, they reminded me that they drive on the left here and sent me on my way.
We pushed our luggage trolley out of the small airport into the adjacent rental car lot and found our blue Corolla hatchback. (Quick rant – every other country in the world provides free luggage carts at their airports, but in the US you gotta pay $5. Thanks, Obama.) Charlotte had already determined she would not be driving in this crazy backwards country, so I hopped behind the wheel.
They let me into the country wearing that mustache.
Luckily Charlotte’s phone plan has reasonable international roaming rates, so she fired up Google Maps and directed me to our cute little motel in Arrowtown, only about 15 minutes from the airport.
The charming Settlers Cottage Motel in Arrowtown, New Zealand.
I think it was around 4:30 in the afternoon, on Thursday, January 30 by the time we got checked in, which means we had been traveling for about 40 hours straight. With a 3-year-old! Laying it out like that really makes me wonder what we were thinking when we planned this trip. We were tired, only a little worse for the wear, and we had made it to New Zealand!
I am getting behind in documenting our adventures, but with all the craziness going on right now, I thought I’d throw up a quick real-time update to let everyone know how we handling the pandemic.
Back in early March, we decided to go ahead with a three-week trip to Hawaii. At the time it seemed like it would have been overkill to cancel, or at least that’s what we convinced ourselves. We enjoyed our time there, and it was great to get to be with Charlotte’s family, but the virus looming put a damper on things. We mostly hung out at the pool or beaches, and cooked in nearly every night. As the news kept getting worse, we felt a lot of guilt, and things started shutting down. We were worried about getting sick, potentially spreading the virus, getting back to the mainland, getting the RV out of storage, and if we would be allowed into an RV park if we did make it back. We were softly kicked out of the resort we were at on Maui a few days before our scheduled departure. We then had to make numerous flight, hotel, and car rental changes, but eventually made it back to the mainland, then Los Angeles, then our RV.
We’re currently in our rig, parked at the Wilderness Lakes RV Resort in Menifee, CA. This park is part of the Thousand Trails RV park network, and Thousand Trails has been great to us, which we are very thankful for. They have remained open during the pandemic, and have allowed us to extend our stay through April so we can shelter in place. We have a membership with them that would normally allow us to stay of just two weeks at a time.
Our days have been spent mostly isolating in the RV. We try to find an excuse to go for a walk every day by taking out the recycling or picking up a package, but it has been tough this past week since it has been raining nearly nonstop since Monday.
Out for a walk during a brief break in the rain.
As a result, we’re all getting a lot of screen time. Charlotte has been working nearly double her normal hours, helping Nebraska Medicine prepare. I picked up a few new games for the Nintendo Switch and have been trying to teach Izzy about the joys of video gaming. Luckily, Amazon has also delivered some new activities and craft supplies, so we aren’t staring at the TV all day.
The Geoboard, one of Charlotte’s old favorites.I’ve never beat her at Candyland.
We have ventured out a few times to buy essentials. The Menifee area has plenty of grocery stores and we’ve been able to keep our fridge and pantry well-stocked, even if our normal items might be unavailable. Charlotte was even able to find a couple of packs of toilet paper in the RV section at Walmart when we first got back.
So that’s about it. We have shelter, food, water, power, TP, and good enough internet to stream Disney+ (and Tiger King on Netflix if Izzy falls asleep). While I’m certainly envious of my friends with big houses and yards to isolate in, things don’t feel too cramped here (yet).
We’re going to try and ride out the worst of things here. Charlotte and I both have some family not too far away, and there is a group of full-time RV families at the park that we’re connected with, so we do have some folks we can ask for help if we have to.
Right now, we’re planning on staying put until May. If things look good then, we’ll probably start the long drive back to Nebraska. But who knows what things will look like in three weeks? Who even knows what tomorrow will bring? We’re doing our best to stay prepared, and staying thankful for our good health and continuing income. We know a lot of people aren’t so lucky.
