Our RV trip got off to a rough start because I had a cold. It started on North Island, but has been getting progressively worse. After we got the RV and some supplies and drove for about an hour, I had a severe sinus headache, so we found a free campsite only 6 km away and decided to stay there.
It actually turned out to be a good idea and it was a very pleasant site. There were 3 other campers there when we arrived and probably a half dozen more arrived after us. You could just park anywhere, and the site was next to a nice little lake (Lake Opuha).
The next day we continued the the original day 1 target, Mount Cook. There is a hike called the Hooker Valley Track that is suppose to be one of the most beautiful in the world. It is the place I most wanted to go in New Zealand. Unfortunately when we got there it was foggy and raining heavily. If I want to hike in the cold rain, and see nothing but fog I can do that in San Francisco. We backtracked 20km to a paid campsite. Here we could hook up power, and they had showers and a community kitchen and BBQ area. They technically had “WiFi” but it was limited to 30 minutes and painfully slow.
The next morning the weather seemed better so we took another shot at Mt Cook, but alas by the time we got there it was raining steadily again, although not foggy like before. I have a light jacket, but I don’t have full rain gear. There were a fair number of people in wet weather gear heading off down the track. Even though my cold was mostly gone I decided not to go. So this is the first time in all our travels so far that weather has really foiled our plans.
We headed south to Lake Wanaka. For some reason our GPS turned us down this very rural track. I guess it was a “shortcut”, but 15km of dirt roads with some obstacles wasn’t very short.
Eventually we got back on the highway and made it to Lake Wanaka.
After resting for an hour or so there we continued to the camp I’d booked in Queenstown. Queenstown is a tourist town on scenic Lake Wakatipu. They had a lot of adventure activities like bungee jumping, skydiving, zip lining, etc. I booked the camp closest to town so we could walk to the shops and restaurants, since it is really annoying to try to park an RV in a town. Unfortunately that turned out to be not a great idea.
It was basically like living in a crowded parking lot. Yanmei kept asking why we had an RV if were we just going to live in a city. She has a good point. So far our best stop was the lovely free park in the middle of nowhere the first day. Time to take a lesson from that as we plan the rest of our trip.