Driving to Milford Sound

So a pretty boring title, but it's a beautiful drive!  When planning our trip, I originally thought we could make it from Queenstown to Milford Sound in about an hour.  At least, that's what it looked like on the map!  Luckily, I checked with Google....and discovered it was over four hours.  Eek!  You have to drive around a large mountain range.  I had to do some rearranging with our schedule so we would could make it fit.  At the time I hadn't booked anything yet (except our Milford Sound excursion) so I didn't have to worry about canceling anything.

Before we understood the road signs, we just stuck close to the car in front of us!

We ended up having to depart Queenstown soon after we arrived (but we're coming back!).  Part of the fun of driving is the one lane bridges.  Obviously, it's cheaper to build it one lane...but do they save that much money?  This is right on the outskirts of Queenstown, too, so there is traffic.  Luckily, we're finally able to decipher the road signs to determine who has right of way going on to the bridge, and safely navigate the ten bridges we cross.

So lots of scenic pictures in this entry, and nothing too exciting happened to us while we drove.  I would take pictures, then put my camera away, saying, "That's enough."  Only to pull it out again five minutes later. 

Mountains, lake, and sheep - quintessential New Zealand

The roads tend to follow either the coast or a lake.

I so wanted to have that little camper!

More mountains and lakes

For a change - mountains and fields

Our first waterfall!  We were excited, and stopped the car to take pictures.  Little did we know that by the next day this would be blase. 

Remember that one lane bridge I showed you earlier?  Well, that's what we were standing on to take this picture with the waterfall.  It made us very nervous, because we had to keep looking in both directions to make sure cars weren't coming - we wouldn't have all fit on the bridge at the same time!




We stopped the car for other pictures, too.  Here we're at an overlook of the Hollyford River, and viewing the work of the glaciers (from about 15,000 years ago).  The roads are actually built along the routes that the glaciers took.  Let them do all the hard work!

Then we stopped to get a closer look at the Hollyford River...no one fell in, though Steve was hopping around on the rocks to get some pictures.

No rocks were harmed in the taking of this picture.

We stopped here, too (and caused three other cars to also pull over - they wanted to see what we were looking at).  It's hidden in the picture by the clouds, but we could see a bit of a glacier on the top of the mountain.  This becomes important to Steve later in our trip...

It's hard to comprehend the scale of the Darran Mountains in these pictures, because there's so little in the landscape.  We left cell service about an hour earlier, and other than the road and a few highway signs, there was nothing man made...which was wonderful!  It's been a long time when I could drive for a couple of hours and not see a single restaurant sign, billboard, etc, etc!  Anyway, I had Steve stand at the edge of the road so you could get an idea of the mountain size.  I couldn't get both Steve and the entire mountain in the shot, no matter what I did.  Since they are about 6000 feet high (the mountains, not Steve), it makes sense.  I just found out you can go ice climbing on them....cool!  Put it on the list for the next trip!

We finally got to drive through the mountains that we'd spent three hours driving around.  It was a one lane (surprised?) road, through about 2 miles of mountain.  It was just carved through the rock - no pretty tile or even concrete to decorate it.  No lights, either, as you can tell by the picture.  I was having flashbacks to Stephen King's The Stand, when the character is trying to get out of the Lincoln Tunnel...

And then we come out to more beautiful landscapes!  I prefer this "tunnel" of trees.

We have our first sight of Milford Sound!  Again, your perspective is off, but there's a boat coming in to the dock (not our boat).

"Not Penny's boat"

Here she is!  This is where we'll be spending the night, along with 60 new friends!