Hi Ho All,

Yes, I am back from my mini trip to Queenstown (NZ) last weekend. My oh my it was fabulous.

I booked us (my bro and ma) in on a roundabout trip via Christchurch, Dunedin then from Dunedin to Queenstown on the bus. Was a bit of a slog, but four hours of beautiful scenery later we were in the little-big town of Queenstown.

This area of NZ is cold, mountainous and snowy - all things which make for great skiing. Queenstown is not a large place, but it was completely filled up with Tourists and Travellers working in town for the season. There were barely any Kiwis around, most of the staff appeared to be from either the US, UK or France!

We sadly missed the night skiing on the Saturday night (arrived too late) but the hotel room was huge and had lovely views out of the lake and the mountains. It's a pity that the service in the hotel was crappy, because I might have considered staying there again.

On the Sunday afternoon we finally made it up the mountain (Coronet Peak to be precise) and betook the breathtaking scenery while we all remembered that we'd forgotten how to ski (well I certainly did - ouchies me side still hurts!). The day stayed clear, but the lifts stopped running at 4:30pm and we had to pack up and go back into town.

Monday - we were up early and ready to catch the shuttle up the mountain...then waited for nearly an hour for it to get there (so typical). Monday was not as clear as Sunday and by Lunchtime it was getting hard to see anything...but by then I had remembered how to ski and was taking on the Intermediate slopes!

Sadly the day ended early when a blizzard came through and visibility got really terrible. Apparently that's quite unusual for the slope, but just my luck I suppose.

Hope everyone else had a great one. Haven't watched much TV recently except for the Burn Notice Season 1 DVD I got from Amazon the other day.

Hugs

Hippo