The Adventures of Steve and Allie: From the Land of the Long White Cloud

For those who do not know, New Zealand is known as the land of the long white cloud, the Maori word for the country.

We are helping an old classmate of Steve's named Randy and his wife Amanda get established as a B&B in their rustic organic farm here in Hawea, an hour or so from Queenstown. Allie is helping get the garden tip-top and I'm doing some manual labor but mostly coming up with creative solutions to getting the structure and outbuildings of the farm functional. That and taking lots of photographs.

It was a long two days getting here from Hancock via Boston, San Francisco, Auckland, and Queenstown and we are finally over the exhaustion. Randy and Amanda have a beautiful place in a fantastic location and work hard to get things going in this place they bought that was in fairly run-down condition.

We've already been a few places in two days and I'll try to accurately list them: Queenstown where we flew into and then took a gondola up to a restaurant and extreme sporting venue (odd combination but it works), Cromwell, the stone-fruit capitol of New Zealand which has a very nice restored old town area, Alexandra, a farming town with places to buy all the supplies they need for the farm, the Nevis Valley which is wild and remote and only accessible by a dirt track, and Wanaka, a very popular town on a namesake lake only 12 miles away. Oh, and I took some photos, so enjoy!