Hello again, Australia

Well, we left New Zealand today.  I doubt that we will ever see a place again that is so naturally beautiful.  We truly loved our time there.

We flew Air New Zealand from Queenstown to Melbourne. The flight was about 3 hours long and uneventful.  Justin edited some pictures while I took a nap and watched The Office and Parks and Recreation.

In Melbourne, we are staying at The Park Hyatt.  Justin warned me that we may not get some of the “perks” that we got at the other Hyatt properties because his diamond status expired a couple of days ago, although he knew that we were booked for the base level suite.  Well……move over Tokyo and Sydney, we have a new hotel front runner! Somehow, we got upgraded several levels, and we are staying in the “ambassador suite!”  This place is crazy!  It is about 1800 square feet with a huge living room, giant bedroom, kitchen, guest bathroom, enormous walk-in closet, and ridiculous master bathroom.  I spent the first several minutes jumping on the bed.  I’m pretty sure that’s what most of the guests in this suite do, right?

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New Zealand – South Island In Pictures

The South Island of New Zealand was incredible…We took a ton of pictures.  The link to all of them is below – there are a lot of them…

Feel free to peruse them and only pick out some to look at; I may have got carried away with the picture taking with the unbelievable scenery.

I tried to upload less pictures directly to this site as it was causing problems previously with all the pictures on the blog posts.  As always, all of the pictures are available at the link in full size:

http://justinandalyce.smugmug.com/Other/New-Zealand-South-Island/28213758_DHGkcK#!i=2386146239&k=mrxZ2GR

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Goodbye New Zealand

Today was our last day in New Zealand.  It has been such an amazing and beautiful country to visit.  I know that we will be back one day, eventually…….

Today, we wanted to take it easy!  In the afternoon, we visited the Kiwi Birdlife Park.

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I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but New Zealanders refer to themselves as “kiwis.”  This term refers to the rare kiwi bird.  It is a flightless bird, which had no natural predators until settlers brought over cats, opossum, and other mammals that killed the baby kiwis.  Now, it is extremely rare to see them in the wild.

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WE WENT SKYDIVING!!

I can’t believe I actually did it!

Like I said, New Zealand is the “adventure capital of the world!”  There are thrill seeking opportunities around every corner.  Before we got to Queenstown, I looked into skydiving as something I may “hypothetically” want to do.  It sounded great and the company we chose, NZone, has a great reputation.  I feel like I read hundreds of positive reviews.  Apparently, they have done almost 180,000 dives without major injury.  So, I mentioned it to Justin.  I still wasn’t set on the idea.  It sounded good in theory, but why would a sensible person jump out of a perfectly good airplane?  I consider both Justin and I to be very sensible people.

Well, we were halfway through our time in Queenstown, and I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to do.  Luckily, Justin made that decision for me.  He said, “we’re doing it” and he called NZone to book our skydive for the next day at 11 am.  And so the anxiety begins……..

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