Ski-town

Pulled out of Dunedin this morning with the intention of going all the way down to Invercargill at the southern tip of the South Island.  It's pretty much as far south as a human being can go without getting wet.  I was kind of excited to see exactly what's all the way down there, but after a ton of negative reviews from people in the Dunedin hostel and the assertion that there really isn't anything to do in Invercargill except turn around and go back, I bailed at the last minute.  Made a right turn about halfway down and took the road across Otago to Queenstown.

Otago is incredible.  Every now and then when I travel, a place makes me stop what I'm doing and start looking at real estate prices to figure out how much it would cost me after 45 years of inflation to retire there.  Zermatt, Switzerland was like that, the southern Moravia wine country was like that too, and now I can add Otago to that list.  The scenery was just incredible.  I could have stopped about every five seconds to take a different picture, but I made myself push on.  It really is just an incredible landscape.  I just added pictures of Christchurch, Dunedin, and Otago, by the way.  It's at http://community .webshots.com/user /MarcsWatson. 

Anyway, I got into Queenstown a few hours ago and made arrangements to do some skiing tomorrow for the Fourth of July.  This will be my second consecutive Fourth of July spent on a ski slope, and I guess there are a whole lot worse ways to celebrate our nation's independence.  Kinda bummed there won't be a big barbecue and fireworks, even on TV, but hey, that's the way the cookie crumbles. 

The Spaceship and I are getting along fine.  Supposed to get a ton of snow tonight right before I hit the trails, so it's probably a good thing I'm not driving anywhere tomorrow.  I just pulled off a pretty great parallel parking job on a hill by the hostel, but it's nothing compared to the job I did in Christchurch.  I actually took a picture of it, that's how proud I was.  It's harder than you think to parallel a giant orange van on the wrong side of the road, so give me some credit.

That's the update.  Hitting the slopes tomorrow... where's Cary Frydman when I need him?  Haha...