Our flight to New Zealand was nice, the flight was empty and we were able to all have our own rows so we could sleep, and we needed it. We arrive in Christchurch at 12:30 am and we get right into our rental car for a 6 hour drive to Queenstown. We get to our car and it is a clown car! We cant fit all of our luggage in it so we had to put a seat down and pour Brit and Sasha crammed in the back. There are no such things as major highways in NZ just one laned country roads and they are not many of them. While driving through the night we drove up and down many twisty and turny roads in the dark, we came prepared with cds tho! We didn't see another car for hours, but what we did see was 100's rabbits darting into the road. Unfortunately I ran one over....we had a moment of silence for the bunny, it was sad. We finally arrive in Queenstown, and check in to our hotel at 6 am we laid down to take a nap until 10 but we all slept through the alarm and woke up at one.We got up to explore and find some lunch, and its FREEZING! since we still had the car until the end of the night we tried to drive over to Deer Park to do some sightseeing especially some Lord of the Rings spots, even though none of us would have known what we were looking at since we haven't really seen the movies. (sorry Maggie and Erin, hate to break it to you but I not a Lord of the Ring nerd like you two! j.k) But we got the directions wrong and ended up driving the wrong way. But no big we still saw some beautiful sights and drove up to Lake Wanaka and saw a beautiful sunset. That night we ate at Winnies and ran in to JP a friend from our spring break trip.
The next day we rented another car and drove to Milford sound which is about three hours away on a treacherous little road that went to the top of some mountains and through a mountain by a mile long tunnel. It was a pretty drive, although this rental didnt have a cd player, so we were stuck listening to Brit and Sasha singing the whole way. We caught a cruise tour boat that took us around the sound. Most beautiful snow covered mountains everywhere! The boat driver would take us almost right under some waterfalls! Nuts! The high light of this day was seeing the herd of dolphins leading our boat, so cool! Nicole was also in NZ and we kept just missing each other, when we got to our car in the parking lot I made a guess on which camper van was Nicole's because I knew they were there too, I left an note on my subway wrapper and put it on their windshield!
Our last day in Queenstown we just hung out in the town, which is super cute it felt like Aspen or Lake Tahoe. It was a cute wintery ski town right on the lake. We took the gondola up a mountain to get a beautiful view of Queenstown and the lake. There is a old myth about the lake called the Maori Legend, the giant Matau burnt to death while he was curled up sleeping after stealing the chiefs daughter. This is why the lake is "S" shaped and Queenstown sits on his knee. This myth is also used to explain the mystery of the rising and falling of the lake every 5 minutes, this is said to be Matau's heart still beating. Anyways, it was so beautiful, this entire trip we kept gushing over the views and the landscape, we probably said Wow hundreds of times. That night we decided to go out for one drink and ran into our friends again who were on the bar crawl so we ended up tagging along and then made a late night stop at the famous Fergburger.
The next day we packed up and headed towards Christchurch but we decided to stop half way in Lake Tiekapo. This was the smallest whole in the wall town ever, there was 2 hotels and 300 people living there. The reason we stayed there because we herd there were hot springs but they were man made but it was still a pretty nice spa. While in Tiekapo at 3 am Brit realized that we had left our passports in the safe a Queenstown! We frantically tried figure out what to do and what would be most cost effective. Turns out that we ended up getting our passports flown first class to Christchurch so we could pick them up before our flight. So scary and dumb!
We arrive in Christchurch with barely any money left, we drove around got some lunch and tried to kill some time. It was a cool city but not much to do there, so we went and saw a movie The Hangover. It was sooo funny! Since we spent $160 on getting out passports to us we decided to get the cheapest hotel possible...the airport. We slept in the airport since our flight as at 6:30 am it was a very eventful 5 days. This was definitely a trip we wont forget! 
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