The most interesting couple in the world finally made it to the most beautiful place in the world – Queenstown (also the adventure sports capital of the world). Even flying into Queenstown is magical – the plane lands between two snow topped mountain ranges right next to glacial-fed lakes. But those are just the surroundings, the city is nestled between one of those mountains and a beautiful and very large lake (Lake Wakitipu) and has the feeling of what I imagine a ski town should feel like. It seems like the population of the city was pretty young, with lots of ski instructors who have had back to back to back winters for years. I’ve never felt so much awe in a place before. Every turn had a better view than the last and I don’t know if WOW is meaningful to me anymore I said it so much. They (hollywood) has filmed a lot of movies out by queenstown and we certainly could see why. We went on a LOTR tour (where Wesley impressed the socks off the guide with his LOTR trivia knowledge) and saw where frodo saw the oliphants, where the ents came out of the forest, and where they blew up wolverine’s house.
We also decided to go skiing (for the first time) while in Queenstown. We took a bus up to the Cardrona ski field. What a scary ride, we had to pull over and have chains put on the wheels of the bus to make it up the mountain. Our ski lessons got off to a great start… for me. But every time I looked over at Wes he had fallen down in the snow. At least by the end of our lesson we both were doing small jumps in the advanced group!
We also made it to arrowtown where we went exploring to find the ‘if you want him, come and claim him scene’ in LOTR, where we ended up having to jump over the icy river to get to the other side. I caught a nice shot of Wes in midair over the water. Apparently, there is lots of gold in the area, and arrowtown used to be a gold town. It was very quaint and reminded me of the wild west (a little bit!).
There and back again 