After our night at Peel Forest, we headed out on the road (after a stop for a flat white and some baked goods) with the ultimate goal of reaching Mt. Cook/Aoraki National Park (seemingly everything in New Zealand has a Maori name and a European name), with a few stops along the way as we wound our way around Lakes Tekapo and Pukaki (tee hee).
Some shots from the drive... this is before I realized that taking photos through the windshield was not ideal:
Sheep!
Fall colors!
Our pit stop/hiking break for the day was the beautiful Lake Tekapo... on Steve and Colleen's advice, we hiked up to the Mt. John Observatory, the long/scenic way (Mt. John Summit via Lakeshore)... gorgeous!!! We didn't get the spring lupines they did, but the fall colors were pretty stunning, too.
Those colors and mountains are amazing, eh? This was one of my favorite hikes of the whole trip... stunning views around every corner.
Sigh... so purty:
Here's my homemade panorama:
Clouds. Lots of clouds. New Zealand has some crazy, fast-moving clouds:
After all the pretty mountain views, you loop back around through a cool pine forest:
And back to lakes and mountains:
