A very frosty day

We had a relatively good night's sleep despite being next to the highway. We woke up early to make sure we were ready to leave by the 8:30am time limit as stated on the signs. Turns out many people didn't seem bothered by this time frame as we left over half the campervans behind us when we pulled away bang on time. We did have a small set back to our morning when Nick decided to check the fluid levels under the bonnet only to discover an electrocuted semi cooked poor bird trapped inside. It was a rather grim sight and the smell was far worse. It was horribly cold this morning and by the time we set off I think we'd only reached 1 degree outside. We visited the small picturesque country and western style town of Arrowtown. It's not far from Queenstown and a nice little place to walk around. It was hard to even want to venture out of the van and into the brisk icy cold morning air. The prospects of coffee and a log burning fire tempted us into the first cafe we saw. I joked to the waitress that I'll sit on the fire guard when she said we could sit anywhere, she thought I was joking but really I wish I could of spent all day in front of that fire. The town had lots of cute features and quirky buildings. We were rather disappointed by the old fashioned sweet shop they had here when we found out you had to buy a whole premade bag of one type of sweet and couldn't get a mixture of ones from the jars. Nick's decided to open a shop in competition offering the pick'n'mix option we longed for. We had planned to do a walk but I really wasn't feeling great so instead we headed off towards a town called Cromwell which is known as the fruit bowl of the South island. We had planned to spend the night here but after discovering there isn't much to do or anything going on we decided to continue on our journey and stay at Wanaka instead. We had laundry to do anyway so this worked out better and after quite a lot of days freedom camping we were looking forward to nice showers and a large kitchen to us. We actually arrived to our campsite at 2pm to really get the most of the facilities and so I could just rest for a bit and start to feel better. We met a lovely Irish couple in the communal kitchen who we talked to for ages. You forget how isolating the campervan can be sometimes without visiting good campsites that have a communal space. The conversation resulted in the girl giving me two things to help with my sandfly bites, something we've discovered I react very badly to. We sat and talked as we ate stir fry and it was just a lovely way to end the day.Read more