Melbourne

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Alyce

Hi everyone! Sorry for the retro review yesterday. We didn’t get home from dinner until kinda late and, honestly, I didn’t feel like doing a post. We were only in Melbourne for three nights, and they went by really quickly! We are already on our way to the Great Ocean Road! The Great Ocean Road is a coastal drive will lots of things to do along the way, plus some beautiful places to stop and take pictures. At least that’s what Justin in telling me. Most of the time I have no clue where we are going until we get there!

Anyway, back to Melbourne……..

Yesterday, we spent some more time walking around the city (although, I REALLY didn’t want to leave the hotel room). We intended to walk to the Royal Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, we never actually made it there. We saw some of the park, but it was so hot and sunny that I could literally feel my skin scorching…….oh the lucky dermatologist who gets to see me after this trip…….!

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Napa 2010 Retro Review

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Justin

I typed this up a couple years ago after we got back from Napa. It’s long, but I had some friends that would be travelling there soon. Plus, I like having the reports (same as now with the wrap ups). We have since been back to Napa, so it is fun to go back and read the report.

We should be back to current stuff tomorrow. Here is Napa 2010 with some pictures from Alyce’s facebook account:

Napa – May 2010

I enjoyed this trip more than I was expecting too. Going into it I was excited about all of the eating out plans and thought touring/tasting the wineries would just be a filler during the day to get to the meals…I was wrong.

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Hello again, Australia

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Alyce

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

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Justin

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

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Alyce

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.

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!!

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Alyce

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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Queenstown and Milford Sound!

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Alyce

We had an amazing first day in Queenstown! We took a helicopter to Milford Sound and landed on a glacier!

I suppose that I didn’t pay much attention to Justin when he was planning this trip, because I didn’t know that we were going to be doing all these incredible things!

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Mt. Cook

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Alyce

We left Akaroa yesterday and headed to Mt. Cook. Once again, the drive was incredible, but this time we also had snow-capped mountains! We stopped many times to take pictures of the beautiful scenery. Unfortunately, the pictures just don’t do it justice.

Like I mentioned before, Mt. Cook is near the glaciers. We were expecting this to be one of the coldest areas that we visit in NZ, but it was just the opposite! It was about 80 degrees when we got there in the afternoon!!

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