Laundry Time in Queenstown

New Zealand Travelog #23
Queenstown, NZ - Mon, 15 Apr 2024, 8am

We're back in Queenstown, NZ, where we started this trip— or, at least, finished flying to get here. This time, though, there's no fancy, two-bedroom "residence". Upgrades like that are rare birds. We're staying at the Wyndham Garden near the airport. Why? Well, 1) it's cheaper, 2) it's close to the airport, and 3) we could book a room with a washer & dryer.



Yes, there's a washer & dryer pair behind the bathroom door. FWIW we had a washer & dryer in that fancy, two-bedroom "residence", too. But you more expect stuff like that there.

One thing I expected with this "apartment", as the Wyndham advertised it, was more space. Alas it's a tiny sleeping area.



This photo is from this morning after we repacked all our luggage to fly. Last night and up until 20 minutes ago this room looked like someone set off a laundry bomb. There were clothes everywhere— clean clothes hanging and laid out to finish drying.

Being able to do laundry mid-trip is an important strategy to managing longer trips. For a trip of up to 4-5 days I'll pack a fresh change of everything. Beyond that it starts getting space-prohibitive. When I travel for 8-9 days I almost always count on doing laundry. That lets me pack like it's just a 5 day trip. With this trip being 14-16 days (depending on how you count it) I would've preferred doing laundry twice. Alas it wasn't reasonable to find reliable laundry facilities (and time to use them) twice while hop-scotching across the entire country, so we'll make do with likely just this one batch of laundry. Since we're mostly hiking we're re-wearing some of our clothes (hike-y shirts and pants) anyway.

1,000 Miles in New Zealand: 5 Things

New Zealand Travelog #24
ZQN Airport - Mon, 15 Apr 2024, 10:30am

I'm sitting at the Air New Zealand lounge at ZQN airport in Queenstown, NZ. Yay, United Star Alliance Gold status... that gets me better treatment from airlines other than United. (United doesn't grant lounge access to Gold members on domestic flights in the US, though partners do in the US— and all other countries.) But United and other airlines aren't the topic for this journal entry. Driving is. In the past week I've driven over 1,000 miles in New Zealand.

Five Things:

1) Driving on the opposite side seems like it should be hard, but isn't. Until the first time I drove in a country where traffic is on the left, I thought remembering to drive on the "wrong" side of the road would be the hardest thing. It's surprisingly not hard. Especially when there's any kind of contextual cue, like other traffic on the road... or even just parked cars facing in the correct ("wrong") direction. I thought driving on the right would be muscle memory and thus hard to reprogram. It turns out it's way more about hand-eye coordination and thus easy for an experienced driver. ...Well, at least for me.

2) Signalling with my windshield wipers 🤣. While driving on the left turns out to be way more a matter of hand-eye coordination than muscle memory, one thing that I've found is definitely muscle memory is hitting the turn signal stalk with my left hand. Yes. I'm one of those conscientious drivers who routinely signals turns and lane changes. But here in driving-on-the-left world, the left hand stalk turns on the windshield wipers. It's switched with the turn signals from what I'm used to. Now after a week and 1,000 miles I'm just barely starting to reprogram myself.

3) I was rolling my eyes at tourist drivers after 24 hours. As much as the dynamics of driving on the left came quickly to me, they don't come quickly to all tourists. Even with all the rental cars having "<-- KEEP LEFT" stickers inside the windshield. By the second day here I was rolling my eyes— and occasionally honking my horn— at obvious tourist drivers who got flummoxed and slowed or stopped in the middle of the road when confronted with alien things like traffic circles.

4) 100 km/h is plenty fast, and some drivers go faster. On the winding country highways between towns the speed limit is routinely 100 km/h. That's equal to about 60mph and is plenty fast for the conditions. I've often found myself driving 90 or even 85 because the road is just too curvy. I compare this to Australia, where wide, straight, multi-lane superhighways were often signed slower than 100. Also unlike Australia, some drivers here do speed. In Australia it was like you could set your cruise control to the speed limit in the fast lane on the highway and keep up with traffic. Here— well, there's no "fast" lane because there's only one lane— but if you're merely doing the speed limit on a straightaway, an impatient driver behind you will overtake you.

5) Apple Maps took us on gravel roads, saving hours. Our car has a nav system, and we've alternated between using it and using Apple Maps via Apple CarPlay. Three times now Apple Maps has offered us a route that saves at least an hour, once it was literally two hours, in getting to a location a few hours away. One of the differences seems to be that Apple Maps is willing to route us on gravel roads. Here on NZ's sparsely populated South Island there are a lot of them, especially in the southeastern section. Mind you, these are good condition gravel roads. It gave me pause the first time it happened, like "Woah, did I make a wrong turn?" but I quickly got accustomed to it. Heck, when we visited Costa Rica years ago i quickly got accustomed to driving on dirt roads between small towns.

Flying to Wellington on the Back of a Giant Eagle

New Zealand Travelog #25
WLG Airport - Mon, 15 Apr 2024, 1pm

This morning we flew out from Queenstown. And wouldn't you know it, the skies were finally clear. The whole fucking week has been clouds and rain, and now I see this from the top of the stairs boarding the jet:



Oh, and I finally saw 12,000' Mt. Cook today, too. Another thing that after two days of being clouded in, is finally visible today.



Unfortunately I only get to see it from the window of the aircraft as we fly over at 36,000', and even then only by leaning over my rowmate in the window seat (after asking politely!) to snap a picture.

Then, at Wellington Airport, I found that instead of flying an Airbus A320, I could have flown a giant eagle.



Yeah, there are a bunch of places in New Zealand cashing in on Lord of the Rings lore. The location sets were famously filmed in this country. I'm pretty sure they didn't use a 21st century airport as a location, though. But I guess if you're going to have people flying giant eagles around, the airport makes as much sense as a birds-of-prey center, and these birds might freak out the actual birds of prey.



Seeing Gandalf atop this giant eagle in the airport all I can think of now is his "You would not part an old man with his walking stick" line in the hall of Theoden with Wormwood's goons replaced by TSA agents.