Day 3-4

Our flight yesterday went well. Although it was only a 2 hour flight, we were served egg & bacon brioches or something like that. Free food rules. The swirling landing into Queenstown was unlike any other landing I've ever done, skirting the edges of the mountains. I was manning the emergency door so nobody had anything to worry about.

After picking up more essential supplies in Queenstown, like a pillow and a chili bin, we headed for Milford Sound. For those of you who don't know, a chili bin is a cooler. Because wacky names and slight changes are essential to make anything you are looking for difficult. The other night I asked for a hotel bar food order to go and the lady asked “to export?” and I thought, alright, that's their way of saying it. But no, she poured us two pints of Export beer. Heather rightly noted that “takeaway” is their version of “to go.” On the bright side, the beer was pretty good. Along that note, I was able to find a long lost beer which I had in Hawaii that I thought I lost forever. It's called Steinlager. And despite the German sounding name, it's from New Zealand. I have amazing memories of that pint I had whilst honeymooning. Of course this time around, it made me wonder what the big deal was.

Half the Milford trip was along straight flat highways through mountain valleys amongst literally millions of sheep and the other half was the craziest mountain driving ever; some might even use the word “ghetto.” In some parts, it wasn't wide enough for two lanes and you had to share one wide lane, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass. Homer's tunnel is an unlit tunnel that looks like it was blasted out of the rock yesterday.

Down to one shared lane

Just a few switchbacks

So I'm pretty sure we left Canada hoping for warmer weather. Well, we've had two freezing nights camping in a row and the prospect for a third is looking pretty good. It rained all last night and all day. Apparently it was only 8 degrees at 8AM this morning (better than the 4 degrees the day before). Fortunately, the scenery was rendered quite stunning by all the rain on our nautical tour around the sound. The tour also included a buffet lunch, a deep sea aquatic tour in an underwater observatory, and an old lady losing her purse.

The many falls

Up close to the rock cliff walls

Us in Milford Sound

Milford all encompassing

Heather drove us some of the way to our stop tonight in Kingston, which is down the lake from Queenstown. Just as I was reminding myself that bats were the only native mammal on the island and the only animals that were being roadkilled were birds, we sped past some sheep on the side of the road. This was probably karma for me saying that hitting a sheep was probably like hitting a pillow and hitting one would likely result in a soft thud and explosion of feathers (as per Hollywood cliche)

We have a small, but raging, stream beside us tonight. So camping night 1 we had to listed to a windstorm slamming our flap (see Mitch Hedberg), camping night 2 we listened to pouring rain, and now night 3 will be just as noisy.