The next morning, we woke up and headed out of the Queenstown area for more adventures elsewhere. We had come up with a plan that involved more wine tasting (yay!), a fantastic lunch at a winery, curling in a little town called Nasbey (definitely not listed in the Lonely Planet guide for New Zealand!), and meeting up for dinner with Brokaw and Drea (who just moved to Dunedin in early November and are blogging about their new life in NZ...go blogger!).
On the way back to Bannockburn, we stopped in at Peregrine Winery in Gibbston Valley to check out the architecture of their tasting room and grounds, which were very interesting and schmancy. They have a great space for holding outdoor concerts and their next show is Jose Gonzalez, sweet! Too bad we won't be around.We didn't taste any wines, being too early, even for me, but apparently they have some pretty amazing wines, and they are distributed a bit more widely than some of the other vineyards we had been visiting (e.g. they are actually sold in the US).
Our first stop in Bannockburn was the Olssens Winery, who also apparently make award winning and famous pinot noirs. If you haven't noticed, Central Otago is renowed for their pinot noirs, and thankfully, that fits in well with what I like to drink. We were in for a bit of a treat because they had some wines open for tasting that they usually don't have for public tasting, and of course, there were some gems in the bunch.
From Olssens, we headed to Carrick Winery for lunch. We had a fantastic table on their outdoor patio overlooking Lake Dunstan and the lunch was pretty awesome.
No rest for the wicked, right after lunch, we had to get on the road as we had a reservation to go curling in Naseby. You may be confused, but we are talking ice curling that is common in Canada. Emily had found a brochure that advertised this little town and their state-of-the-art facility for curling, the Maniototo Curling Rink. Naseby is also the home to members of the Olympic curling team from New Zealand. We were very excited.
Out of the four of us, John and I were the only ones who had curled before, both of us in high school. We befriended the rink manager, a jovial guy named Fred, who agreed to let us "slide", which they usually don't let beginners do. We played in two teams of two, John and Emily versus Will and I.
It was a tight game, with great plays, a lot of impressive "hurry-hard!" sweeping, and sliding galore. We were in our element. In the end, Will and I edged out John and Emily with a 6-5 win (after two hours, we only managed to complete 5 ends!).
From Naseby, we were back on the road and rushing to the east coast of the South Island to meet up with Drea and Brokaw for dinner (we were late, of course). They drove up the coast from Dunedin to meet us in a little town called Waianakarua for dinner at The Mill House. This also worked out well because we didn't have a place to stay and the Mill House is also a motel. Sweet!
After dinner, Drea and Brokaw convinced us to go check out some yellow-eyed penguins who are spotted close to dusk at the nearby reserve at Katiki Point, a sanctuary for this species that is endangered.
We got to the reserve pretty late and hiked down to the reserve viewing area when the sun had already set. We managed to get views of one little yellow-eyed penguin before a very angry public servant found us and gave us quite the lecture about being there after closing. Unbeknownst to us, the reserve had been closed for 20 minutes and we had an earful. It was an exciting end to a pretty fun day, and we quickly bid goodbye to Brokaw and Drea before heading back to The Mill House for zzz's.
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