As the great Ice Cube says...Today was a Good Day!

Hola.  This is Luke.  I decided to take a turn at the good ol' blog.  As the title suggests, today was a good day.  As Rachel previously mentioned, we awoke at 4am.  It is currently 7:30pm and it has been a funfilled day.  We decided to go for a hike on some of the trails around here.  Well, I should say we decided to go for a walk....as we both were wearing jeans.  But at least we had good tennis shoes on and packed some snacks.  We headed toward the mountain that has a gondola ride to the top and started hiking.  Little did we know what lie ahead!  It was fun, but man was it work!  That was one steep mountain that never seemed to end.  Wearing jeans and not having any water didn't help either!  Good thing we found a wonderful tree stump that was shaped perfectly like a chair so Rachel could stop and rest! 

Well, we made it to the top where they have a nice restaurant, lounge, great views....and a wonderful gondola ride down!  While we were up there we had some lunch and enjoyed the beautiful scenery.  Then we strolled around the quaint "downtown" of Queenstown.  It's very nice.  There's a little section of streets that is only for pedestrians, no cars allowed.  This area is filled with fun shops, clothing stores, and restaurants.  We stopped at a supermarket to pick up some groceries....and a 40oz bottle of Australia brewed beer!  Coopers Pale Ale. 

The better part of the afternoon was filled with reading our books (who knew we were such readers!).  We also had to relax and rest up after our big hike.  Our legs are already sore!  For supper, we decided to check out "The Cow".  The nice lady at the airport that we talked to told us it was a great place. It was very small, tucked in an alley and the original building. It was built in 1860 and was the first cow milking barn in Queenstown. We had really good pizza and some very good New Zealand wine called Mud House.  Now, we're just back at the hotel, relaxing, and I'm about to do a little work.  Today had a little bit of everything....good food, good scenery, good company, and a good hike.  It was a good day.