Winter?

For the third time in just over 2 weeks, we have snow on the hills.  Yesterday we dropped from about 24 degrees down to 4 in the space of about 4 hours.  A bit of a shock to the system really considering it's supposed to be the height of summer!  We're not exactly complaining though, Queenstown really is very pretty when there's snow on the hills - 15-20 cm of it today.  If it was winter we would have been hitting the slopes for a powder day...

We took all of these photos standing inside our house this morning!

Ben Lomond and Bowen Peak from our dining room

Cecil Peak and Walter Peak

The Remarkables from the spare room

Looking down the lake towards Kingston (also from the spare room)

And the one photo we didn't take from home - Coronet Peak (this photo shamelessly ripped off from the Gondola webcam).  Just like winter... without the snow base of course!

There was so much snow that there's still some on the hills now after a day of sunshine, but it will be gone by tomorrow night.

Happy New Year!

It's been a while since we've blogged and we've been all over the place since then!

At Christmas time we spent 7 days in the North Island and caught up with a lot of family and friends.  It was great catching up with everyone, even if the "summer" weather wasn't really much to write home about.

We got back to Queenstown on New Year's Eve, and had been home for about an hour when we were invited down to the beach for a picnic dinner.  While we were there we were invited into Skippers Canyon camping with 2 families we know the following night.  The weather in at Skippers was spectacular and we all had such a great time we stayed a second night.  Our little camp site was well set up with our 3 tents arranged around a picnic table and the BBQs, tables and cookers we brought with us.

We were then treated to another couple of weeks of the same spectacular weather and began wondering when it was going to rain.  All of the lawns were looking very dry, other than those lucky enough to have been regularly watered - there had been no rain for nearly a month.  We'd left a timer going on our vege garden while we were away and came home to a jungle. We've now harvested and frozen all the leftover spinach (15 bags full in the freezer!) as it was going to seed, the peas have just finished after 3 weeks worth of meals for us and the neighbours and the bean trellis is showing signs of being just as prolific as the peas.  There are so many orange flowers on it now - this photo doesn't show the many many little green beans there already either.

And then overnight one night it finally started raining, and the rain continued off and on for 2 days before we woke up on the third day to this:

No rain for a month.... and then snow in January!

Normal transmission has resumed now though and we're back to scorchers again.  The farmers are all hoping we'll get regular weekly rain now through till Autumn, but NIWA isn't so sure.

And finally, when we moved we wondered whether we would still see the awesome sunsets we used to see at the old house.  With the new angle on the view we thought we might miss out now.  Not so much.