Let the fun begin........

Today's the day our travels and fun really begins when we pick up our 1st Hire Car!!.🚘 Checking in for the car, Jayne unwittingly played a blinder and bagged us a free upgrade. As the guy was doing the paperwork Jayne asked if the car had a sat-nav, unfortunately he said only the bigger cars are fitted with them, but if we wanted sat-nav we would have to have one of them. "Well, I suppose we could manage," we said, so we are now driving around in a Toyota RAV4 SUV and not a Hyundai Kona. With sat-nav working perfectly and our destination in Mount Cook locked in, we soon found ourselves driving out of the Christchurch City limits and onto long glorious pot-hole free straight roads. As the scenery changed from houses and industry to fields and farms of the Canterbury Plains, the roads became quieter and so easy to negotiate. We crossed many bridges that stood over dry gravel river beds, a different story in the depths of winter, I imagine. We drove on through an area called Ashburton; centre of sheep and wheat farming, and onto the Mackenzie Basin. We stopped for a coffee ☕️ on the banks of Lake Tekapo 🏞; where a small church of the Good Shepherd perches on the lakeside. This all seemed very much like the Lake District but it quickly changed into a sea of purple as we drove past a Lavender farm and then into a far more dramatic landscape with snow capped mountains as we drove along the Tasman River and then up into the Tasman Valley and realised this area really does put the Lake District into the shade!!
After driving 330 miles in over 5 hours plus various stops for photographs 📷, we finally arrived at our accommodation for the 2 nights we are at Mount Cook in the Aoraki Court Motel. It was a pleasant place, but very limited in terms of food, etc, but blessed with spectacular scenery.Read more