The fine and sunny weather keeps on keeping on and is not spoiling our plans to get to a new location for us or back to places we have been to before.
You might think we would lie in bed a bit longer and enjoy the views over to Kelvin Heights because it is Sunday.But,no,with a planned trip to Glenorchy, some 50km north of Queenstown at the northern end of Lake Wakatipu, we need to be a bit more on the ball this morning.
But before we get to the Grand Tours top undiscovered location we have a couple of other places to revisit that we have been to before.
Since we arrived we have watched cars travel slowly up and down a road on Kelvin Heights above the housing that appears to end at the top of the hill where there seems to aerials etc.It isnt that we necessarily have to get to the top but it would be interesting to look back over at where our apartment is situated from the other side of the stretch of water known as Frankton Arm. How to get
to where the road starts though could be interesting as when we have checked Google Maps, no road is shown!
Heading past the airport we located the road to Kelvin Heights and started our exploration of how to get to the summit of the hill opposite our apartment.
The suburb is with houses as the downtown area is and although there are houses perched on the side of the cliffs above the water they seem more accessible than some on the other side of the water including the access to our apartment.
One mystery that we think we solved was where the bright light in a row of lights from. It turned out to be a Christian camp with a lot of buildings which had the ‘Full sign up.
We drove to where the houses ended with only one obvious road into a domain being the likely access up the hill.
We thought that taking a stop at Lake Hayes rather than just driving past might reveal some trees with the autumn colours we were after. But no such luck and we must say we were a bit disappointed leaving that expectation unsettled.
Arrowtown was a different story and although we entered from a direction we werent familiar with the small town did not disappoint.
Gone are the schoolchildren and their parents that were evident in Queenstown and we guess they have all headed back to wherever their homes are located. So Arrowtown has been given over to the over 65s and the couples whose children are off their hands. There are plenty of us and the narrow main street is full of people strolling along admiring the original buildings from the late 1800s which make up the set of shops, cafes and small restaurants that make up area of the town.
The scene looking along the main street was as we remembered from past visits and in reality nothing much looked like it had changed.
bit more vibrant and we put that down to perhaps the overnight temperatures being colder than Queenstown.
With a distance of around 50km from Queenstown to the new location to discover our stroll around Arrowtown and headed for Queenstown.
We are unsure of what there will be to discover at Glenorchy as we hadnt done any research so whatever turns up will all be new to us.
Driving through Queenstown confirmed what was apparent in Arrowtown that school children and their parents had finished their holiday and headed home as the streets were fairly deserted even at midday.
We are using our trusty 2001 NZ Road Atlas for our driving guide and we expected to find that about 2/3s of the road to Glenorchy would be unsealed. However to our surprise the road was sealed all the way with a dotted line down the middle all the way.
We passed by a number of small newish small settlements and stopped at a couple of points on the road where the views up and down as well as across the lake were outstanding.
the middle of the lake we came into the outskirts of Glenorchy which we could now tell was going to be a much larger location than what we had imagined.
