It's Thursday evening and we just arrived at the locale of our third
race weekend in Invercargill at the Teretonga Raceway. For the past several days Diane, Elaine, and I acted like typical NZ
tourists making our way to the Queenstown area for a couple of days and seeing sights on the way.
On the way we had
a great side trip to see the Mt. Cook area well as Lake Tekapo and the Wanaka area. The weather has been perfect for touring
(and pulling the race cars) with not a drop of rain while on the road. (P.S. the minute we hit town today for a race weekend
it rained on us! But, we've been assured it will be a nice weekend. Sure hope so.)
Oh yes, there has been significant
shopping by all of us.
Queenstown is the where bungy jumping as a commercial enterprise for tourist got it start about
25 years ago. The Queenstown area is beautiful, sort of an Estes Park on steroids (see second attached picture). Set in dramatic
mountain vistas (e.g. where Lord of the Rings was filmed), the lake is huge, beautiful, with all sorts of nice homes and resorts
around it. It has somehow become the world capital of extreme tourist sports attractions with jetboat trips up the river (which
we took), bungy jumping (which we watched), heli-bike rides (which we marvel that anyone would even consider), bungy jumping
from parasails (Good grief!). And on and on.
Today we drove from the Queenstown area to Invercargill. This is at the
southern most part of NZ, next stop Antarctica. Just hope for westerly winds, not from the south! Apparently the damn wind
always blows so western wind is the best you can hope for. Otherwise it going to be cold and wet, straight from Antarctica.
They've assured us, however, the weekend weather is supposed to be great. Right. I'll believe it when I feel it. Of course
to them, down this far south, anything above 70 degrees is a heat wave.
Elaine will be with us until Saturday AM when
she will go to Auckland for a couple of days and then back to Houston. We'll miss our Pit Pixie. She will miss being a Pit
Pixie, but seeing another race track probably isn't high on the priority list.