So those of you who know us well, would also know that we love our beach holiday in Caloundra every year. For me, though I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of skiing and alpine holidays. Deb has quietly resisted this idea, and now I have a more full understanding of this resistance. I have been monitoring the forecasts, to try to pick a decent day in the snow, but one thing I’ve noticed is the unpredictable nature of weather in New Zealand and so made a decision that we would try the alpine thing at Cardrona about 30 minutes outside Wanaka. Call me immature, but I do just see the name Wanaka and see ‘Wanka’ with an extra ‘A’… anyway, I digress.
It’s about 120 kilometres from Alexandra to Cardrona and it started raining pretty much as soon as we left the town limits, pretty much as forecast. We persevered and eventually found the road in. Many people catch the bus from Wanaka and I was about to find out why. The road up was wet, potholed and badly corrugated in places. After about 10 kilometres of windy unsealed road, we reached the point where the snow chains need to be fitted. We took them out of the boot and started trying to interpret the instructions that may have made sense to someone who’d seen them before when I nice young man, presumably employed by the resort put them on for us. It was another 4 kilometres to the lodge from there. Visibility was low as it was snowing and the cloud had closed in so looking ahead was as white as my knuckles were from the death-grip I had on the steering wheel. Eventually, we found the car park which was snow, ice and a howling wind.
At this point we gathered all our warm stuff and steeled our nerve to walk the 50 meters or so to the lodge. Among the things I had to gather were the two halves of the car key for the rental car. One half being the traditional key and the other being the remote locking device. I had snow pants on, so my normal pockets for all my other things (wallet, camera etc..) were clearly not going to work. Deb was not really able to assist as her glasses had completely fogged up, so she couldn’t see a thing.
Of course, upon finding a spot in the lodge to sit and have a hot chocolate, I then noticed that remote locking half of the car keys was not in any of my pockets and was probably out in the snow somewhere. A couple of fruitless searches failed to turn it up, so we’ll just have to open the car the old school way. While we’d been sitting I was considering whether I wanted to spend $129 for a day pass to go out in what was the closest thing I’ve seen to a blizzard. The answer was NO!, but I did go have a little look at the other souls out there.
So then, it was back to the car for the journey back down the mountain. This seemed easier and we got to the area to take the chains off the car. There was no nice young man to help take them off this time. Sometimes in life, one’s mind can drift so while I was battling to reverse engineer the chains that I did not understand, the was a girl helping another car put theirs on. She was squatting and therefore exposing her G-String clad behind, and that where I got to thinking … ‘This isn’t the place I would have expected to see that’ … Anyway, moving on, we drove back in to Wanaka for lunch and a bit of a wander.
As we had lunch, the weather started to improve, of course. I was in no mood to drive back up the mountain. I will try to find a day next week, but this time will be more mindful of the conditions. I’m still definitely of the mind that the beach holiday wins!
Here’s another photo of Lake Wanaka after the weather improved.
From there it was back in the car for the drive back to Alexandra. We spopped by Lake Dunstan on the way back to refresh as the whole experience was rather tiring.
Dinner tonight was at Deb’s Uncle Ross’s house. He lives in Alexandra and has invited us to watch the rugby at the local club tomorrow night. Not sure that is such a great idea, watching the Wallabies at Eden Park (haven’t won a game there since 1986), but I’ll put my brave face on anyway.
Until tomorrow
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