This is the weblog of our adventures. It started with our trip to New Zealand and Australia, but nowadays is just a place for our day to day posts. Follow us on our adventures and let us know what you think!

Monday, November 27, 2006

AKL -> QNS

As beautiful as Waiheke Island was, we were excited this morning to move on to Queenstown where we will be for 7 days. Since we're traveling with backpacks, it's totally non-trivial to pull one and two pieces of clothing out for a day without undoing the entire pack. In Queenstown, we will finally be able to completely unpack for the week and live out of a dresser/closet. Gene overwhelmed our palettes again this morning with an amazing breakfast. We woke up to fresh brewed coffee and tea, and homemade croissants and boysenberry jam. The croissants were so incredible, we could have eaten a dozen of those alone. Then came the second course, a berry compote with homemade muesli and yogurt. When we thought we were totally sated, Liz brought out Gene's third course, an egg, ham, bacon and cheese frittata with an accompanying plum sauce. Holy cow. Needless to say, that breakfast at 7:30am tied us over the Auckland to Queenstown flight and hotel check-in and we finally decided we should eat something at around 3:30pm, even though we still weren't really all that hungry. We've spent the day putzing around Queenstown, which we love on first impressions. The flight in was a little hairy, as the plane buzzes the mountain tops and then banks a sharp u-turn to drop into the valley before threading two mountain ranges and landing on an elevated runway that appears to suddenly jump out of the valley floor. People have said that Queenstown is super crowded (compared to the NZ countryside), kind of "fake" and built-up. To us, it feels like a mountain town, a lot like Breckenridge. And really, what's not to love about that? Lots of backpackers around, we felt like just another young couple backpacking their way around at the grocery store and filling the pack with a week's worth of eats to go with our suite, which the Heritage Queenstown was nice enough to upgrade us to for free. Speaking of groceries, the store had the obligatory Vegemite, which we passed on. But, per request, we did pick up a pack of TimTam's, the "most irresistable chocolate biscuit". They were tasty for sure.

6 comments:

bballrick said...

Hply Smokes! It sounds and looks wonderful. Your description of the breakfast and dinner made my tastebuds jealous. Pictures are great!. Enjoy Queensland and bring me back some Tim-tams.
Tank

Oompa Loompa said...

Tank love Tim-Tam

Oompa Loompa said...

"Tank just smiled gave me a vegemite sandwich" - Men at Work

Vegemite is made from leftover brewers' yeast extract, a by-product of beer manufacture, and various vegetable and spice additives. The taste is difficult to describe but is extremely salty and slightly bitter, and as might be expected, malty, similar to the taste of beef bouillon. YUMMY

John said...

I would actually describe Vegemite as tasting like venison left out in the sun for 2 weeks, and it smells very similar to sheep ass.

Molly said...

"TimTams are fantastic. Make sure you have TimTam shooter" - Scott Sheffer

John said...

What's a TimTam shooter?

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