We had a gentle morning and did a short hike in some trails around the Dolamore Park campground, before packing up and driving along a scenic highway to Queenstown. We stopped to take some photos of the beautiful Lake Wakatipu just before arriving at Queenstown.
On the edge of town beside the airport, we stopped at the Maui RV rental location to have our drawers fixed by their maintenance staff. The repairs only took about 30 minutes to complete, and we didn’t have any other problems for the rest of the trip.
A day or two before on our freedom camping app we found a modern and well appointed Driftaway Holiday Park RV park just outside of Queenstown with an amazing view overlooking Lake Wakatipu. We booked one night there so we could explore Queenstown, have a hot shower and recharge all the batteries in the RV.
After getting settled in at the RV park we decided to walk along a lakeside pathway to downtown Queenstown which was about 7km from us.
The downtown area has a lot of activities going on and does a great job catering to all the tourists visiting this gem nestled between Lake Wakatipu and the surrounding mountains. Queenstown reminded me in a good way of a town like Canmore in Canada. We enjoyed some ice cream cones while we people-watched and heard people talking with accents from around the world. So far in our trip we think this was our favourite town. It had a good vibe.
When we were ready to head back to the RV park, another 7km walk didn’t sound very appealing given how tired our legs were feeling, so we spotted a water taxi that stopped at a few different places on the lake including our RV park. When we arrived back we made dinner in the spacious common kitchen and then had nice long showers.
Before we went to bed we planned our next few days. We’d planned on staying one night in Queenstown, but when we saw how beautiful the area around the city was, we booked a second night at the Driftaway Holiday Park.
The next morning we rented bikes at a bike shop only a 5-minute walk from the RV park. Heather chose an e-bike and I rented a regular mountain bike. We then started a 27km mainly uphill bike ride to the historic Arrowtown. There were some pretty steep sections of the mix of bike trails and roads on the route that Strava suggested for us, which Heather was able to motor up, and she kindly waited for me to huff and puff my way to the top. Over all it was a beautiful ride, and I was able to get the kind of cardio workout that I hadn’t been able to do so far on our trip.
In Arrowtown, we wandered around the formerly precious minerals mining town, exploring the little shops and eateries. We eventually found a nice place to enjoy an outdoor lunch and enjoyed to ambiance of the town.
Heather brought a cool t-shirt in Arrowtown before we started our 27km ride back to the RV park. We couldn’t stay too late or we would arrive too late to return our rental bikes at the bike shop. As it turned out we had about 30 minutes to spare, even if if meant that I was huffing and puffing pretty hard when we pulled up to drop off our bikes.
Once we were back at the RV park we made use of their shower facilities before starting on dinner for the night.
After that, we used the excellent RV park laundry facilities and then decided to walk about 2km to a grocery store. We’d done some meal planning so that we could stock up on food before we travelled to other smaller towns in the mountains. On our way back from shopping we were treated to a spectacular sunset that we were able to get a picture of before the sun went completely down. We arrived back at our RV in almost complete darkness, but we were stocked up and ready to drive to Lake Wanka the next day.
