Dirk & Dixie's New Zealand Adventure 2025

  Monday, Feb 24, 2025.  Woke up to lovely view of Lake Te Anau from our RV. After oatmeal and plum breakfast, we hit the road to Milford Sound, with a quick stop at the visitor’s center for a guide to walks along the road. Got our audio tour set up and enjoyed the background it provided along the route.   Stop 1 was Lake Mistletoe.  Nice pseudo bracken fern over my head. Stop 2:  Mirror Lakes.  Mountains getting crazy steep and jagged.  Brown scaup ducks on lakes. Stop 3:  Cascade Creek to Gunn Lake:  huge red beech forest with tons of moss.  Another giant! Not the beech trees we learned about in Nova Scotia! Learned about three types of beech:  silver (serrated leaves), mountain (pointed leaves) and red (with thin pliable rounded jaggedy leaves)---all the leaves are tiny and they are evergreen.   Stop 4:  Hollyford Road to Lake Marian hike ---short walk up endlessly cascading river...

Feb 22, 2025.  Left Haast and were pleasantly surprised that we followed the vast Haast river valley way up into the mountains, so that when we got to Haast pass we had barely noticed that we had climbed and the road had not been perilously windy.    We made one stop at the Rushing Billy Falls Walk  for about 20 minutes,  passing through a lovely forest  to the river bottom where we looked across at the falls. Trees big enough for a small home. Drove on to the Blue Pools, a premier destination, but the trail was closed because a bridge washed out, so we drove on.   To our surprise, we passed into Aspiring National Park and the hillsides became barren and brown. All the glaciers or snowfields were melted so it was an Eastern Washington sort of experience.    We passed a lot of cattle and sheep pastures and closer to Queenstown there were a number of orchards and fruit stands.  We stopped for fresh peaches, Black Friar plums, and some...