Route 77 to Eyjafjallajokull

The roads out of Lake Takepo towards Christchurch didn’t look all that inspiring on the map, as they all seemed to merge into urban areas the closer we got to Christchurch, so when we saw a sign for ‘Scenic route’ we hedged our bets and went for it, we did after all have 10 hours in which to get to the airport!

This turned out to be a great idea, as the roads was once again, lovely! The sun was shining, and there seemed to be barely another soul on the road. Slowly but surely though as we drove up towards Mount Somers we started to encounter first small pockets of towns and then a greater increases in the urban sprawl, but it’s great – their version of populated urban areas, is our definition of countryside :)

We started following the course of the Rakaia river towards Christchurch and took this at the lovely Rakaia Gorge…

But bit by bit we were reeled into the city and towards the end of our fab holiday. We stopped off at a book shop for Suz to get herself some more reading material for the plane, and somehow found ourselves in the biggest shopping mall that we’ve seen in the islands, then carried on towards the airport to drop the car back off, before waiting around for our flight at 6.00 pm

We checked our bags all the way through to LHR and then waited once more for our flight, and were actually pretty relived when we took off towards Auckland and our connecting flight to LAX. LA was fun though, first off they tried changing our seats on us on the plane (I was having none of that though, and made a nuisance of myself until the ground staff conceded and let Suz and I have our already confirmed seats back again – don’t cross a tired, grumpy and travel weary Tom, is all I can say!). Then as we were backing out of the gate, they announced a slight delay in take off, as apparently a volcano in Iceland was spewing ash, so they didn’t really want to fly over it, and were re-routing across the Atlantic.

Many hours (and in flight movies!) later, we hit the ground in LHR, and I was wondering why the sky around the airport was so quiet, usually Heathrow is buzzing with air traffic, it wasn’t until we pulled up to the gate and I phoned Lou that she let us know how lucky we had been – we’d landed at 11.38, and the UK closed it’s airspace to all traffic at 12.00! We’d squeaked in by 20 minutes! As we got into the arrivals area, all of the boards had nothing but ‘Cancelled’ messages all over them! Phew!

As we came into the arrivals we had another nice surprise, Abby and Carly had made us nice banners to hold at the exit for ‘TOM & SUZ’, brilliant :)

So back now, weary and in need of a shower, before we both try to stay awake and head off the jet-lag, though not sure how successful we’ll be!

What a wonderful holiday though, an amazing place with great people and scenery, can’t wait to go back and do all the bits we missed!