Day 20 - Arrowtown, Skyline Gondola, and More Casinos

March 5th & 6th– Arrowtown, Skyline Gondola, and More Casinos! We are currently sitting in the airport in Christ Church, NZ as we have another day of flying ahead of us. Only one more day of site seeing down under and we are on our way back to the U.S.! Nathan is so excited he can’t stand it (truly- I am not making this up) – back to ABB and his conference calls (he has missed a few in the last couple days b/c of the time change and it is KILLING him!) - back to work – yippee! (BTW – I am excited about getting back to work too – I love Swagger and miss my mom very much! Is that enough sucking up? Probably not! No- truly we never could have come this far for this long without her and everyone else at Swagger – thank you so much!) Actually I think Nathan is excited about not spending any more money – for all of you wondering – trips to Australia/New Zealand are not cheap. Of course – I’m sure we could have done it cheaper as we have met several people our age who are traveling for 5 months plus after quitting their jobs – but we still HAVE jobs - so LIVE IT UP – right?!!! So our last day in Queenstown started with a trip to Arrowtown (about 20 minutes from Queenstown). Arrowtown is the city the Gold Miner’s set up back in the 1800’s – it is on the Arrow river where a lot of gold was originally found. Pretty cool – nice restaurants, history, and you can still pan for gold. Not too exciting though and if you had to pass up something on your travels to Queenstown I would suggest this. However, there are some Wineries on the way there that we heard were good. We took a photo of the main street just to say we were there – (it is pretty lame though).


After getting back to Queenstown we took the Skyline Gondola up the mountain to see the views of the lake, city, and mountains.

They had a luge at the top that was a lot of fun! After rounding a corner on one wheel and almost taking out two asian children – Nathan was 30 seconds behind my world record breaking time. However, Nathan cheated on the second go round and barely crossed the finish line only seconds before me! I believe I still won though as my two combined times were MUCH shorter than his!

We spent the rest of the night at the Skylight Casino – poor guys almost had to shut down we took so much of their money! The really fun thing about gambling is meeting the other people at your table (we were playing blackjack). We met some great kiwis, irish men, and even Americans. Small World Story – so a gentleman sitting to my right asked where I was from. When I said Raleigh he mentioned that his son and daughter in law live in Cary. I mentioned I owned a gift store and asked their last name – and low and behold she is a good customer! I told the him to come visit the next time he was in town - only at the gambling tables in Queenstown, NZ!

That pretty much covers Queenstown. Although we enjoyed ourselves and it was nice to relax and just tool about, my suggestion would be to stay only 3 full days (I think we were here one day too long) and spend two days in Christ Church if you can.

We are off to Sydney (via Brisbane – we LOVE layovers)! We can’t wait to see Carolyn, Julia and the whole family! It is amazing how close you can get to someone when you invade their homes! See you guys soon!