It’s been a few days since we returned from our two weeks in New Zealand, and it already feels so long ago… We kept a pretty good account of our adventures in our journal, so it’ll be a truncated account that I’ll report here. We really enjoyed the trip, despite the rain and cold that were to be expected in a New Zealand winter. We spent the first third of the trip around the North Island, from Auckland to Rotorua to Napier to Wellington. It rained, mostly, but we still enjoyed the Maori culture, the thermal pools, the Art Deco architecture, and the city of Wellington as a whole, our favorite of New Zealand’s bigger cities.

After two nights in Wellington, we took a ferry across Cook Strait, and then caught a train down the East Coast of the South Island to Christchurch. We spent a fun three nights in Christchurch, riding the tram, visiting the Antarctic Centre, and hanging out with Aimee’s friends Hall and Miles.

From Christchurch, we took another train, the TranzAlpine, from east to west over Arthur’s Pass, where we encountered snow for the first time on the trip. We spent a night on the West Coast near the famed Pancake Rocks, then headed south through Franz Josef Glacier, past Mt. Cook, through Wanaka, and into Queenstown.

Yes, that’s a 1939 Austin Big 7 and Jar Jar Binks.

In Queenstown, we enjoyed some of the adrenaline activities the town is famous for – paragliding, watching people bungy jump, and so on – and I took a day trip to the spectacular Milford Sound.

New Zealand certainly lived up to all of my expectations: it was gorgeous, filled with a huge spectrum of natural beauty, as well as uniformly friendly people, and plenty of great things to do, tasty food and craft brews and vineyards. Plus, if you fly Business Class (save those frequent flier miles, folks), the twelve hours it takes to get there is like a vacation unto itself! We vowed to return in their summer someday, and visit all the places we missed this time around.

Check out as many of the 700+ photos on Flickr as you can get through.