Remarkables!

View from 1st Tee

No, the heading is not a typo.  Yesterday evening the Milford Sound downpour reached Queenstown and it hosed it down for much of the evening and night.  We woke, though, to some sunshine and, on opening the curtains, saw that above a certain height the rain had fallen as snow - we had a great view of it from our hotel.  Today was a golf day - at a place called Jacks Point, which ranks very highly in New Zealand's best courses and, on one review, is number 1 on the South Island.  The course sits on a headland alongside Lake Wakatipu and is quite spread out on the estate.  The lake is in another glaciated valley and both sides are, basically, mountains.  The scenery was stunning.  Why we say that the heading is not a typo is that the range to the east of the course is called The Remarkables and this morning with the snow laying above a certain level they certainly lived up to their name.  At times concentrating on the course was less than easy as, everywhere one looked, the views were a major distraction.

The course itself was described as a links course - which it isn't really, by UK standards - but it was still a very good course to play as the fairways were in beautiful condition and the greens were good and true (albeit not as fast as usual due to the 35mm of rain they got overnight).

View over Queenstown, its park and golf course

After golf, we went back into Queenstown and up to the local viewpoint in a cable car.  Up the hill they have activities such as bungee jumping, sky swings, paragliding and an option to cable car up and then mountain bike down the hill.  Sadly the sky swing and paragliding were closed (well, we were not really sad) and we avoided the bungee jumping - we did though decide to do one of the actvities.  Our girls (and Liz, Nicole,Kristi & Matt) will need to cast their minds back to Rotorua as being the last time we did this!!  There was a wheel luge run and, therefore, we took the chair lift further up the hill, donned our helmets and rolled off down the hill.(Good nostalgic fun!)  The views over Queenstown and the surrounding area were very good and we were able to get a perspective as to where we had been over the past few days.  It is our last night in Queenstown tonight and tomorrow we are off to Franz Josef to see the glaciers.

Hope all at home are well.