It was 5PM in Te Anau, and from our experience on the way out yesterday we know that the town absolutely shuts down at 9PM. So, we decided to take advantage of the final four hours of the Te Anau night. We saw a great movie in town called "Shadowland," which is a half hour of footage captured by a local helicopter pilot on flights throughout Fiordland. Captured from a very unique standpoint, the scenery was spectacular. The manager of the theatre came in to ...

We spent the last day in Queenstown walking around and enjoying the day. We grabbed lunch at a little sushi place on the pedestrian mall with great lunch deals. We took off pretty late for Milford Sound, which was about a four-hour drive from Queenstown. Halfway through the drive, we stopped off briefly in the town of Te Anau for dinner, but every place we went to for dinner was closing or closed. After all, it was 9PM. :) Things close down really early here. ...

Just outside of the Mount Cook area in a place called Twizel, we passed a salmon farm and decided to buy some fresh Mount Cook salmon (a must try in NZ). There was a sale on salmon, but it turns out it was only for the whole fish, not filets. So, we bought one. They pulled it right out of the water, gutted it, put it on ice, wrapped it in paper, and gave it to us. We put it on the floor in the bathroom in case it leaked fishy goodness. We figured we would deal wi...

On our way to Mount Cook, we stopped off near Lake Tekapo, the site of among other things, a tiny picturesque little church called the Church of the Good Shepherd, which overlooks the lake. A fellow traveler in Chiang Mai told us about it, but if Bev's eagle eyes hadn't picked it out, we would have driven right past it. We walked into the church, sat in the front pew, and looked out through the large picture window that frames a fabulous view of the lake and mou...

Hi all! Sorry we have been so bad about blogging out here. Things seem to close down very early, and we have mostly been blogging on the laptop and waiting to upload. So, we've got updates for the first two weeks in New Zealand, and we'll try to upload our blogs before we leave each destination. We've been seriously on the move out here, so we're never in one place for very long, which makes it tough for blogging, but fun for everything else! We'll start with an...