Queenstown- New Zealand

Stunningly beautiful! Queenstown is truly remarkable!

Queenstown is a resort town on the South Island of New Zealand. It’s located in the region of Otago and has fantastic views of The Remarkables Mountains. Incredible!

Flying into Queenstown was pretty amazing. The mountains were huge and seemed to go on for miles and they were very close to the plane! This picture doesn’t begin to capture how cool it was flying in.

We stayed right in town in a penthouse apartment on Shotover Street. We didn’t need a car because we could walk to everything!

This is the view from our apartment. Not bad huh? From the hot tub I felt like I was on an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous-remember that show with Robin Leach?

We are suckers for cute mountain towns so naturally, we love Queenstown! It reminds us a bit of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It’s fall here and the colors are gorgeous!

We had a really nice walk around the Queenstown Gardens with stunning views of Lake Wakatipu.

This cool bronze fern sculpture greeted us at the entry to the gardens. The Fern is a symbol associated with NZ-it’s on the dollar coin and used by the rugby team, the All Blacks.

There are lots of opportunities for extreme adventure in Queenstown -jet boats, zip lines, bungee jumping and even extreme play-grounding…

We found our own little bit of excitement…

During our walk around the gardens, Lola got a major nosebleed. (Of course, I had removed my pack of Kleenex from my purse that morning.)

A passerby gave us some napkins, which was very nice of her but not enough for the gusher that was developing.

We continued the walk and ahead of us, they were filming a TV show. Proving that New Zealanders are super friendly, a medic (cute with the amazing accent btw) from the set gave us gauze and helped Lola out. We totally appreciated it!

Lola doesn’t care for birds much. Imagine if this South Island prehistoric giant Moa bird still existed…yikes!

The Kiwi Bird is a national icon of New Zealand. (Luckily, isn’t this big!) It has hairlike feathers, is nocturnal and can’t fly. We haven’t seen any this trip but we did see some several years ago when we visited Te Puia, Rotarua on the North Island.

Harry and Helena walked up the Tiki Trail to The top of the Skyline Gondola. It’s about an hour hike up the mountain and they rode the gondola down from the top of Bob’s Peak. They loved the incredible views!