Queenstown, day 7– eating and more eating

 

Our last day in Queenstown was a day of eating. We started off at Amisfield Winery for a  delicious lunch.

our set up.

Ellie was at the head of the table.

Charlie.

the food was spectacular. it is a tapas type menu and it worked perfectly for our group.

Dotes and Claire sharing a lettle kess.

this is LOVE! dotes spending her vacation wrangling claire at a fine dining establishment.

Love having them here!

even with all of our traveling we haven’t really resorted to using our iphones to entertain the kids. finally I brightened up when things were getting loud and crazy and we busted out a few “candy corn” (candy crush – mary and elliot showed the kids how to play) games.

our original plan was to eat outside, but it was raining when we arrived. we brought the kids out back at the end when we rotated wine tasting.

not sure what it is with our kids, but if we didn’t tell them 1 million times to not go into these decorative pools they would be in there in a second. anyone else have issues with this?

the bumblebees are as big as horses here.

taking over my shift.

belly up!

I fell in love with this wine. Amisfield Lowburn Terrace Riesling 2010. we bought one bottle and Bubba and I finished it tonight (New Years Eve by 7:30 pm! wahoo!). It is AWESOME!

leaving the scary dude at the front behind.

next stop – Arrowtown. It is an old mining willage and the mining parts were ok, but the town was really cute.

swinging claire!

ice cream time!

the flowers are beautiful and so is bubba!

a little bit of downtime before we had a babysitter coming so just the adults could go out. we all went out to an amazing dinner at Gantleys – it was a long slow meal and it was nice to spend a night away as just adults.

Friday morning (the 27th of December) Dotes, Elliot, Me and Laura flew to Auckland with the kids. Tom & Bill flew to Nelson to start a fly fishing extravaganza. Mary and Elliot then waited in the airport for 5 hours and flew out to Tahiti (rough!) for 5 nights before flying back to the US.

Here we are saying goodbye to them. I was bawling my eyeballs out. It was MUCH harder to say goodbye this time than it was in July. We knew what was ahead of us and it made it much worse.

Charlie giving Uncle Elliot a big hug!

Elliot showing off and wearing his bungy jumping shirt!

What a trip! It was a great vaca and a totally different side to NZ than we had experienced or scene before. I loved every minute of it and honestly didn’t want it to end. What a very merry Christmas we had!

Queenstown, day 6–Christmas Day

Christmas morning 2013 – the kids woke up to 3 small stockings. Charlie woke up around 7:30 and just crawled into bed with us. Then he waited patiently until we woke the girls up around 8:30 (the sleeping den is the best!). I love that they were excited about three small stockings and didn’t notice the lack of a tree, lots of presents, etc.

Charlie ready to check out his stocking.

the dive in. notice the box out move charlie is doing to claire.

to be honest  - they were most excited about the mini m&ms in the stockings.

charlie pumped about a TMNT paper airplane.

Mary surprised me with a gorgeous bracelet! love it!

learning about super heros.

again – most excited about chocolate – claire showing off the other fun piece of chocolate – reese’s peanut butter cups.

charlie got a trout fish pen that he had saw at a little store and so sweetly asked to show it to me. I went back and got it later.

not a bad backdrop to wake up to on Christmas morn!

claire’s fancy nancy book.

we then drove through Wanaka to our first hiking spot.

slamming a few sandwiches before taking off.

we took the Sawyer Burn walk.

the hike was a bit more intense than we initially thought. we did get beautiful views though so it was worth the sweat.

elliot and I (with ellie) hiked all the way to the top and didn’t have a camera to snap any pictures. we felt like the view was almost the same from this spot so we hiked back to here and met up with the rest of the crew.

my partner for the day – Eleanore – she didn’t stop talking for 1 seconds. Bill told me later than Claire didn’t stop talking for him either.

driving out of the area there were cows with calves everywhere. we also saw this bull. we were thankful for the fence with this one (the other ones were free).

we then drove a bit more to the blue pools and took the little walk to the blue pools.

the forest was so mystical feeling.

ellie was happy to be free.

charlie showing off his skill of skipping rocks.

eleanore.

Merry Christmas! This was a very different Christmas for me (and us). We loved it and it was a fun change. I don’t think I could do a Christmas like this every year, but I definitely want to continue the stress free Christmas feel. It was so enjoyable!