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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Next up: Omarama to Timaru