Feb 2008

This heading might be the closest we'll ever get to seeing a post from Brody. It was his (much appreciated) creative contribution to the website.

We haven’t been up to much since we've been in Wanaka. It is a sleepy little town that doesn’t provide much to do for the extended stay traveler. We've exhausted our cultural possibilities. We went to see a movie at an artsy local theatre that has yanked out all the seats and replaced them with couches. Comfy, but apparently the couches require an increased ticket price, seeing as how we paid about $13 each to get in. We checked out the air museum (I couldn’t bring myself to pay the $10 to get in when I lived nearly next door to the Air Force museum for 2 years and never went for free). We checked out the local brewery. And...that is about it. We're left with hiking and lake-related activities, which there seems to be no lack of. It’s just tough to find time to do it when I work days, and Brody works nights.

The whole area is pretty and full of fantastic scenery (I'm wondering how many times I'll say pretty, beautiful, gorgeous, and fantastic in this blog...but its all necessary to even begin to explain the countryside). The mountains are amazing because they shoot up thousands of feet out of flat land. It’s as if you took away the entire Front Range and just saw the Rocky Mountains appear in the middle of Kansas. And you can drive down any dirt road and happen upon gorges, waterfalls, vineyards, etc., etc. All these attractions would have brochures and tourist shops at home in the states, but here, you're lucky if you see a little road-side sign hinting that something of interest might be down the road. We drive around a lot looking for nice places to stay for the night. Its not a difficult task, although, most nights we stay closer to town near a dried up river bed (I'm glad they're in a drought) so we don’t have to drive far to get to work.

Speaking of, Brody is less than liking his job. I think he'd rather be thinning apples, which says a lot about how much he hates washing dishes. I don’t mind my job at the cafe, I really like most of the people I work with and the environment is fun. I get to taste all the baked goods and gossip all day. Rough stuff. We hope to get next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off so we can temporarily fall back into the role of tourists and get down to the Dunedin area.

I've posted a few more photos to make up for how much I've been slacking over the last week or so. I had to figure out how to compress the images so they would fit on the website since we get a meager monthly allowance.