The brown Otago landscape is a welcome sight after the drenched green fields of Taranaki. The deep blue water of Lake Wakatipu is surrounded by mountains sweeping skyward, their rugged peaks draped with snow. The mountain air is brisk – my senses seem to sharpen with its chill. Downtown-Queenstown visitors are busy with their cameras [...]
Weather-wise the last few months have been lovely in Pukekohe, nowhere near as cold as we are used to in the Wairarapa. It is almost fun to watch the weather and see a 10–12 degree difference in the overnight temperatures between here and there. We have been doing quite a bit of travelling recently, with [...]
The offer of a test drive in a new EV motorhome recently added to the Britz rental range was a golden opportunity. This was the proverbial killing of two birds with the one stone. The first being I have never driven an EV on an extended run and I was curious to see how it [...]
November is here in all its glory. It’s a lovely warm sunny day in Martinborough as I write this. We’ve had a seriously busy couple of months, and travelled over 2500km in just two weeks at one stage, because we could – that’s living the RV lifestyle, LOL. At the end of the last Chronicles [...]
Here we are in midwinter, snow has blanketed all the ski fields and more, but at least the rain has stopped for the moment. We ended our last column in Whangarei - a walk along the city waterway for us all, lunch at one of the many very good restaurants on offer, and then it [...]
After riding around the globe finding the best trails to map, I returned home to the shores of Lake Wakatipu only to discover that the Adventure Capital (Queenstown) was about to open its own cycle network. While familiar with the area, I was eager to explore parts of the Wakatipu basin that were unreachable by [...]
On our way down the West Coast, we stopped off at Franz Josef Glacier Guides’ base in Franz Josef in the hope the weather would allow us to fly up onto the glacier by chopper. The impressive complex was alive with hearty-looking guides in red shirts and shorts with climbing ropes, pitons and two-way radios [...]