Mount Cook - Wanaka

We were looking forward to our next scenic stop along our route, the Mount Cook viewpoint.  Inside the welcome center, we found this rendering of Mount Cook.  Gorgeous, right?  

Unfortunately, although we had two opportunities to view Mount Cook during our South Island adventure, each time the Mount was bashful and hid behind some clouds.  Oh well, the view was still stunning and the color of the lake water took our breath away!

Here's a zoomed-in photo of Mt. Cook, with only the base visible.  Why so timid, Mr. Cook?

We opted to pass on the 2-hour drive to the base of Mount Cook, due to the cloud cover.  

We made our way to Wanaka, a quaint lakeside town about an hour outside of Queenstown.  During our stop in Wanaka, we met up with some new friends, the Jones family -- Mike and Holly and their six kids, also from Utah.  Mike is an ER doctor like Steve.  They moved to New Plymouth about the same time we moved to Palmerston North.  Their oldest son Noah met Rachel in January at the LDS youth conference in Auckland.  We had been corresponding via text when we learned that both of us would be visiting the South Island at the same time, and our paths finally crossed in Wanaka.  I'm super bummed that I didn't get any pictures with them!  They were traveling with some of their friends and we visited with them only briefly, but it was such a pleasure to chat with another family in our situation and to share experiences.

We met at a fun stop called "Puzzling World" -- decided not to go through the attraction as we still had a little traveling to do, but we did get a few photos outside:

The wind and rain kicked up again as we traveled from Wanaka to Queenstown.  We had heard about and read about and seen many photos of Queenstown, but it was even more beautiful than we had anticipated, even in crummy weather.  

Looks more like winter than summer with that fresh snowfall on those peaks, right?  It felt like winter, too.  Thank goodness we had packed for cold weather...our coats and hats and gloves got more use than we would have predicted.  Even in the less-than-ideal weather, we were having a great time, and were all looking forward to reaching our campsite, a DOC spot called Moke Lake.