We’ve been checked out for the last few weeks, between the end of my mom’s visit and Covid making a nasty appearance again 😦 but everyone is much better now and we’re feeling back! So let’s recap the last few weeks of September.
Mara got to go to the wildlife reserve again, this time with her whole preschool! The Early Childhood Learning Center is absolutely incredible. They took a bus full of toddlers and preschoolers to the zoo!
We made the long drive from Christchurch to Queenstown to meet my mom and Andres for a mini get away and trip to Milford sound. Mara did great on the 5 hour drive, thanks to cocomelon and baby shark!
We arrived in Queenstown in the middle of a rough storm. There was a landslide that came into town (no one was hurt!) and a state of emergency declared. Our original plan for our Milford Sound tour was cancelled because the roads were washed out . If there was any place to be hunkered down though, our Queenstown Airbnb was it! The views were absolutely amazing – a recurring theme here in New Zealand!
Wylie and I managed to reschedule our Milford Sound tour for the next day. We took a teeny plane from Queenstown to Milford Sound and then went on the boat cruise. This trip is one of those that everyone says you must do in New Zealand, and it totally lived up to the hype. It was incredible! The flight over the mountains was amazing, I had this great sense of calm being among the tops of these giant mountains that have been around for millions of years. It was very cool.
The boat tour in the sound was so beautiful. The weather cleared up but we still got the benefit of the recent heavy rains and got to see so many waterfalls. The boat drove right up to several falls including one temporary falls due to the rain where the light caught the bottom and lit it up with rainbows!
Then we saw a few pods of dolphins swimming along the boats path. It was literally rainbow and dolphins!
Queenstown was a very cute little town, and of course so kid friendly, just like everything else in New Zealand. We geared up for the rain, but it wasn’t too bad!
The whole crew made the drive back to Christchurch together. Everyone was feeling a little under the weather by that point so it was a pretty long drive… but we made it. My mom extended her trip to get some more time with Mara so we got to do a few more things in Christchurch that we didn’t get to at the start of the trip, including the tram through downtown Christchurch and hanging out at one of the many kid friendly food halls.
We said a teary goodbye to my mom after almost a month long visit. Then after all the activity and challenging sleep for a few weeks, we all needed some good quiet time to recover. For some of us, that meant catching up on sleep on the bus 🙂
Wander & Nest 
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