A Weekend in Queenstown

Alright Folks, here's the news: my computer is "uneconomical" to repair as there is some corrosion to the motherboard. So, this means that I have no means of uploading pictures at the moment. However, I will continue writing so you guys can stay updated while I work on figuring out how to get some pictures uploaded. There are also a few pictures on Face book that I will try and bring over along with some Internet ones that aren't mine so you guys can get a little bit of an idea of what is going on. Anyway, enough of the boring stuff. Let's get on to the cool adventures.

This past weekend I went to Queenstown with the Otago University Snow Sports Club. We left on Friday at about 4:00 and arrived in the outskirts of Queenstown at 8:45. Our first stop was a trampoline joint that had four trampolines and a foam pit to try and do tricks on. They also had some foam wake boards so you could try and do boarding tricks off the trampolines into the foam pits without hurting yourself. We spent about an hour and a half there before moving on  to our hostel.

We stayed at Pinewood lodge which was a pretty cool place. We had an entire flat of rooms to ourselves with 2 kitchens and a big living room so it was a pretty good set up. We just hung out Friday night so we could do some cool activities on Saturday.

On Saturday we woke up and made breakfast and rented Frisbee golf disks from the hostel. Queenstown is actually one of the few cities in NZ with a frolfing course so this was a big deal for the kiwis who had never done it. After frolfing we had a BBQ in the beach of the lake that borders Queenstown. The city provides really nice propane grills for free use to anyone which I thought was really cool. Anyway, after the BBQ we walked around town for a bit because they had a little handicrafts market going on and we also got to watch an impromptu traditional Maori choir perform for us. For dinner I got the famous Fergburger which, I kid you not, was about 10inches in diameter. I was actually a little disappointed in my burger just because I think it was too hyped up to ever reach my expectations. However, it still deserves recognition for size alone. That night we had plans to go to a local bar called "The Find" and attend a concert called "The Hot Dub Time Machine". I really enjoyed the concert because it was a lot different than I expected it to be. The DJ played a few songs from each year starting in 1960 and worked his way up to the present so the concert was kind of like a greatest hits tour of the last half century. I lost my voice about 2 hours in from singing so much. The room itself that the concert was in reached about 90 degrees by the end of the night and everyone was drenched in sweat from dancing so much. It was a blast. After we left the concert at around 2am we got back to the Hostel and were promptly woken up by a fire alarm from the flat below us. They had ripped the smoke detector off the ceiling so that they could smoke in their rooms. I didn't get to sleep till about 4am because of that.

The gondola

Flatmates at he top of the Gondola

'Murica on the lake

On Sunday we all woke up early to clean up the hostel and check out. We hit up Fergburger for breakfast (they have breakfast burgers with eggs, hashbrowns, and bacon) and then headed out to get our adrenaline on. We started by taking a gondola to the top of a mountain bordering the city limits and did some luge-ing at the top. We stopped at a bungy jumping place so people could go jumping and ziplining. I didn't do either because they were too expensive. After that we drove another hour or so to get to Cromwell where we got to a bridge. We jumped off the bridge. The bridge is about 12-13m above the reservoir that it crosses. The entire experience was exhilirating. We all got up onto the bridge and climbed over the railing then one by one jumped off. The view from the top of the bridge was amazing. You look out over this quaint town with a deep blue lake stretching out under you with mountains in the distance and the Sun shining. The water was clear and cold and added a shock factor to the adrenaline of jumping off the bridge. I haven't felt that alive in a long time. After that we finished up the drive home and we arrived at about 9:45pm. What a great weekend.

The gang pre-jump

I'm the one jumping in the plaid shorts