An early morning this morning and we got the obligatory Fergbaker breakfast. It is getting a bit old now and we are likely to switch our breakfast up over the next few days. Ronnie walks down by himself to get the breakfast and never gets sick of the morning views over Queenstown.

We were going on a bit of a road trip this morning. We drove through the Crown range road to Cardrona. The Crown range road goes about 1km up a mountain and is the highest road in New Zealand. It is dauntingly beautiful. If you time it right, you can see planes fly by you.

Just over the mountain you come to a little town called Cardrona which is famous for exactly two things. The historic Cardrona hotel (more on that later) and the Cardrona Ski Resort which is where we were going today. Now you might be thinking “hold on, it’s summertime, why would you be going to a ski resort?” because they convert it into a mountain karting and mountain biking playground during the summer. First you have to get up the mountain though. This mountain is enormous (1800 metres) and we had to drive up it on the sketchy dirt road. It is certainly not for the faint of heart.

The views from the top of the mountain were stunning. You could see so far into the valley. We geared up and got ready to do some mountain karting. The mountain karts gravity driven so all you have to do it get in the kart and cruise down the hill. This sounds like the luge-ing but is way different. Firstly, you go way faster and you’re on a dirt track so you can drift around corners. There were three tracks, we ended up doing about 9 runs in our allotted 2 hours. When you get to the bottom of the track you just jump on the chair lift and head straight back up for another run. We found this activity to be incredibly fun and worth the difficult and scary drive up the mountain.

We took the dicey drive back down the mountain to go to the historic Cardrona hotel. It is a beautiful little pub that was built in 1863. It is in good condition and is so charming. We saw out the back in a beautiful little glass house that they have in their beer garden which is also really nice. If this place was in Bathurst, it would be extremely popular.

We ordered some meals to all share together. We got a fried pizza bread with lamb belly bacon and caramelised onion, which was interesting but good, some loaded wedges which were about what you’d expect, we got some corn ribs with miso butter that was lovely, despite literally being corn on the cob shaved into ribs and some frickles which Aimee said were delicious.

After our yummy comfortable lunch at the Cardrona hotel we ventured on for another 20 minutes up the road to Wanaka. Last time we stayed here we fell in love with Wanaka and knew we had to come back. It is such a nice place. We always said that if we ever moved to NZ, we’d probably live here. We stopped briefly at #ThatWanakaTree so that Nan could take a picture of it (we photographed the hell out of it last time). It is the most photographed tree in NZ. There is something artistically beautiful about it despite it being a normal tree in a lake. There was a guy there busking and a woman with a canvas set up painting the tree. It is popular.

Then afterward we drove over to the Wanaka town square and grabbed some bubble teas and sat on the side of the lake taking in the stunning views. Ronnie took a dip into lake Wanaka even though it was far too cold as he is determined to swim in all of the bodies of water we come across.

Our time in Wanaka was short and we ventured back to Queenstown as we had planned to go to the Queenstown Twilight Food Trucks. We got there and even though the website said it was still on, apparently it ended a few weeks ago so nothing was there unfortunately. This left us scrambling so we went and got some Thai food at a local Thai restaurant called @thai. Ronnie had a pineapple fried rice with prawns that he said was nice and light and Aimee had egg noodles with pork belly which she said was good, but nothing special.

Overall it was another quality day with a subpar ending. The food trucks would’ve been good. Oh well.

Much Love,

Ronnie, Aimee & Julian.