Monday, 14th November 2022

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We’ve finally made it to New Zealand!

Had a very early start today. We were up just before 3am to get to the airport for our delayed flight @ 6am. Thankfully, there were no more delays and we finally arrived in Christchurch just after 11am.

It was a pleasant surprise to see that SIXT didn’t charge us for the day we missed due to our 20 hour flight delay, so that’s one less battle to have with Qantas to claim compensation for. We’re quite pleased with our Skoda Kodiaq, not only does it have all the gadgets you could possibly need, it’s also a nice shade of blue!

Even with our later than planned start to our first day in NZ, we managed to catch up with our original plans for today, a drive over to Lake Tekapo and then back out to the coast to Oamaru where we’d booked the Asure Ambassador Motor Lodge.

The drive was quite long, about 5 hours in total, but once we got out of Christchurch and onto the inland scenic route it was such a pleasant drive the length of the journey didn’t matter quite so much.

We stopped off a few times to soak in the amazing lake and snowcapped mountain views. Roy has a lot of photo’s to sort through to pick the best ones to upload!

We arrived at our motel at around 7pm, Oamaru is a lovely place, there’s more here than we thought there would be, including a great viewpoint and penguin colonies. If only we hadn’t had to use up half the day flying over here, we’d probably have had enough daylight and energy to explore it a bit more.

But, after the long, wasted day at the airport yesterday and the stupidly early start today, we are shattered. We’ve just settled in our room and suspect we won’t last much longer before crashing for the night. At least with the 2 hour timezone change it means we managed to last until the slightly more respectable hour of 10pm! Sounds much better than the 8pm it would be if we were still in Australia.

Hopefully after a night of rest tonight, we’ll be rejuvenated and back on track with our original plans in the morning.

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