Lake Tekapo

I'm finally back here!! Lake Tekapo is one of my happy places in our world and it's an honour and privilege to be here 😀😀😀 The trip into Mackenzie Country with the beautiful snow capped mountains (it's been snowing a bit around the South Island) elicited a lot of happy sighs from me and various comments from Trev such as " oh my god!!", " you're just showing off now New Zealand!!" and "stop it!!" to show his love for this country.

We were booked for the Dark Sky Summit tour tonight but when we got there, they warned us that it might not be able to happen due to the cloud cover and gave us the option to do the Crater tour with a partial refund, book another night or full refund. We opted for the Crater tour and boarded the bus. The tour took us 5 minutes away to a man made crater that had some gorgeous telescopes. Our guide Oscar showed us where Saturn and Venus are, the Southern Cross, true north and south are and we were able to see Saturn through the telescopes. Wow!! Saturn was so clear and I could see the ring and some of Saturn's moons. We learnt that Jupiter buffers a lot of debris and asteroid impacts that could hit the Earth and how auroras are made. As the cloud cover got worse, they had to call the rest of the tour off and offered a full refund! I had a beautiful night.Read more