Day 7- November 24th

Since there aren’t really any pictures to post from the last 2 days I figured I owed the blog one day worth of dazzling vistas and scenes. We spent the night at a Wellington home we found through airbnb.com, took the early morning ferry to Picton, ate lamb at Subway, took the train to Christchurch, and spent the night in jail. Yes, this is the day to pay attention to.

We really wish we had spent more time exploring Wellington. We had 2 weeks to see the whole country and we wanted to relax at the end so we took one “free day” in Queenstown at the end. This was really to make sure if the weather was bad we would still get to go hanggliding. Since the weather turned out fine we wish we had spent that free day in Wellington but c’est la vie.

The ferry and train were fantastic ways to traveler. 3 hours on the ferry and we were able to score seats on the highest glassed in deck on a little peninsula which meant no one could stand between us and our views! 180 degrees of fantastic views! The train ride was 5 hours and was also stunningly beautiful. Since we didn’t have much time between the ferry and the train we ate lunch at the train station which meant Subway. McDonalds, Burger King, and Subway were all very prevalent in New Zealand and we’d been passing a lot of ads for lamb at these fast food giants. Subway’s lamb was quite good with their Moroccan sauce.

We passed a whole colony of fur seals on the train but didn’t manage to get good pictures of them. We also saw a dead whale that had washed up on the shore. Anyone know what kind it was? That was sad but interesting to see. We also did some eavesdropping on a group of little old ladies who were visiting from Australia and made a lot of inappropriate jokes about what they were going to do now that they had some time apart from their husbands (every single one of them had a walker and I’m sure none of them were under 75).

We stayed at my first hostel which was, until 1999, a prison. It was a very cool setup and Chris and I were staying in a cell complete with bars on the window and a thick steel door.