Back and forth over the Crown Range

Friday – Wednesday, November 2-7
The last few days have been a whirlwind of trips back and forth over the Crown Range. Just driving over the range by myself on the other side of the road was an event for me. The road is a narrow mountain pass, just slightly wider than a lane at some points, with winding hairpin turns. The narrow road was a challenge, even without the RVs full of tourists lumbering around the corners in the middle of the road. I see the tourists and hope they aren’t Americans used to driving on the other side of the road, like me. The vistas of mountains and valleys are stunning and keep me distracted, for better or worse. I want to stop around every turn to watch the lambs in the fields. Little packs of lambs leap around in the soft early morning sun. Others are passed out like clumps of bright white wool sunning in the lime green fields. The little lambs seem to sleep with complete abandon and unawareness of the world around them, like passed out puppies.

Sunday, 4 November: we put an offer on house outside of Queenstown. The day was filled with drama and changing expectations. We are certain of the area we want to live. There are two properties of vacant land and a property with a house for sale available. We decided the house was just too expensive for us. We spent several nights thinking about and imagining building our own place. In the end we were to put an offer on the land. Just as we were putting together the land offer, we heard from the house sellers’ agent that the house sellers would entertain a lower bid than we thought. So, we instead put in a bid on the house. The sellers rejected our bid. We then decided to put an offer on the land again and as we were signing the papers for the offer on the land, the house sellers agent called back and accepted our offer. We are thrilled!

We are also all feeling a bit uprooted as we consider moving to another apartment over in Queenstown. While the boys were at school on Monday, Doug and I headed over to Queenstown to visit the two elementary schools and look for another apartment. First, we stopped by St. Joseph’s School. We met the principal. She asked if we were Catholic. I was just about to say no, but Doug, quick on his feet, replied, “I was brought up Catholic.” The principal said that the school role was full. However, open enrollment for the next school year would be on Wednesday. She suggested that in the meantime we should make an appointment to meet with the parish priest. Doug and I continued on to the second school, Queenstown Primary School. I had visited Queenstown Primary School in August 2006, but Doug has never seen it. We look around and introduced ourselves. Unfortunately, the principal was out for the day and I made an appointment to meet with him on Tuesday. We also found an apartment just in time to drive back over the Crown Range to pick the boys up from school in Wanaka by 3 pm.

Tuesday, I again drove over the Crown Range early in the morning, met with the principal of Queenstown Primary School and enrolled the boys. They will start school in Queenstown on Thursday. I dropped some belongings in our new Queenstown apartment and then drove back to Wanaka to get Doug and pick up the boys from their last day at Wanaka Primary. While I was in Queenstown, Doug packed up our Wanaka apartment. Liam and Colin found Cameron after school and said good-bye. I promised Liam and Colin that we would come back over to visit Cameron and I would take all three of them to Stuart Landsborough’s Puzzling World. All four of us drove one more time over the Crown Range, my third time over the pass of the day.

Our new Queenstown apartment was absolutely horrible. The place was bitter cold. Paint was peeling off the ceiling and walls, one toilet didn’t work, and everything was filthy, really filthy. Doug and I couldn’t believe we hadn’t noticed these obvious details when we viewed the property. We just made sure it had enough room to sleep. I guess we figured we were paying enough that the place should have met some basic standards. Wrong. We moved out first thing in the Wednesday morning. Then, we had nowhere to stay. We decided if worse came to worse, we would rent a hotel room or two for a few days. Rentals for seven weeks are hard to come by in Queenstown. We could find lots of rentals for six to nine months and there were holiday homes rented at exorbitantly high rates by the night, but nothing available for the in between time frame we need. We are also trying to rent during the 100th anniversary of the NZ Open Golf Tournament which was to take place in Queenstown for the first time. We had planned to spend the day exploring Queenstown with Liam and Colin. Instead, we spent hours looking up rental apartments on the laptop at an internet café, making calls, and waiting to hear back. Finally in the mid-afternoon we found a place that did meet some basic standards – heat and somewhat clean. The apartment is like a shoebox on terrace down a steep hill with four rooms, one room on each level. The top floor is a loft, the entrance level is the kitchen living room, the next level down is our bedroom and bath and the bottom level is the boys’ bed and bath that also open to the outside, just further down the hill. There is almost no storage space, about two drawers per person and two small closets. Luckily we don’t have much to store at this point.

I did break down and buy some shoes and several sweaters. I had hiking shoes and sandals. It is too cold for sandals, but I needed something besides hiking shoes. Shoes, I discovered, are expensive here and they seem to all come in wide widths.

The views are like having IMAX screens for windows. Every room of our shoebox apartment looks out to panoramic lake and mountain vistas. The mountains loom across Lake Wakatipu. The peaks are still tipped in white. The upper slopes, that have just lost the snowy cover, are brown. The lower slopes ring the lake in green. On calm days we can see their wavering reflections on the lake’s glassy surface. We watch the steamship TSS Earnslaw cruise back and forth from Queenstown to the farm on the far side of the lake. From our perch above Queenstown, we have learned why Queenstown is the Adventure Capital of the World. Yellow jet boats whip tourists around the lake. Schools of sunfish sailboats tack back and forth below us. The Americas Cup boat preens by with its fancy sails. Helicopters buzz past. Paragliders spiral into town. Kayakers paddle out to play. We are at the bend in the lake facing north and can look west and east. We watch the weather and storms pass along the lake. The wind can blow. Our whole apartment seems to stand broadside to the prevailing winds. It shutters and creaks in the gusts.

The real adjustment was Liam and Colin having to start at a second school. They completed exactly one week of school in Wanaka. How I wish we had waited one more week to enroll them and thus avoided yet another transition. Oh well. Doug and I debated this decision. We know now that we will settle in Queenstown, even if this house deal falls apart. We decided Queenstown will have more work opportunities. And, as we spend more time in Queenstown, we’ve found areas where both of us can picture living. We thought about staying in Wanaka and letting the boys finish the school year, which is only about six more weeks. But the whole reason for having the boys start school was to make connections and friends in our new home. We will move into our new house in Queenstown over summer break and if the boys start school in Queenstown they will know some friends in the area before summer break begins. In either case, the boys will have to switch schools, now or after summer break in February. In the end, we decided that settling in Queenstown as soon as possible would be the best for all of us despite having to switch schools. We might as well get as many transitions over with as soon as possible, because there are many of them and they aren’t going away.

I really appreciate the time and efforts the Queenstown principal, staff and teachers took to make us, especially Liam and Colin, feel welcome. The boys’ teachers have been sensitive to the challenges the boys are encountering. We feel very fortunate they are in such welcoming and nurturing classrooms to start their time at Queenstown School. Colin and Liam continue to amaze me with their composure, openness and willingness to try new things. Literally being the new kids on the block is hard once let alone twice. Finding their place in their new world, new school and among their new peers will take time and is not easy. Doug and I hope that in the end it will make the boys stronger and more resilient. As a mom, I worry about all the transition they are going through each day.

Here are some pictures around Queenstown, many taken from our shoebox apartment.