Friday, April 10, 2009

South Island Holiday

These photos are all out of order, but anyway! This is part of the view from my father-in-law's vineyard in Bannockburn, Central Otago. The grapes are going to be ready for harvesting in a few days. Richard lives in a big huge red barn with living accomodation upstairs, and this is a section of the view from the veranda. In this photo the Crown Range is barely visible in the distance. Out of picture to the right is the Pisa Range, which is topped with snow.

Mt Cook, or Aoraki. We had great luck with the weather on the day we visited. We were in the sun but only a few short kilometres away there was cloud cover and rain.

Lake Tekapo the morning after the big snowfall. Cold! The melt was already well underway by this point.


Poor Cleo has about four inches of snow on her saddle ...

Hamish calls this my "Pip freaking out" photo, as in "OMG - we're going to be stuck here by the snow!"
Lake Tekapo the day before. Still lovely at this stage. The weather closed in a few hours later. note though that it was extremely windy and that the wind was cold, a warning sign.

Me about four kilometres into my 15km run and really feeling it. Altitude training, apparently!

The Northwesterly blowing up a big cloud bank in Canterbury. Very stunning skies.

Marble Mountain near Springs Junction. There is an earthquake fault about 100 metres away, easily identifiable on walking through the field as a large rise and then fall in the topography. This is where I ran my 7kms the day after the Grape Ride.


Marble Mountain again!

I ran 12 kilometres today on a beautiful sunny, calm Bannockburn morning. Plenty of short sharp hills and a long flattish section on gravel alongside the lake. Beautiful! It still felt hard though, but I suspect that was the result of all the wine I've been drinking. 28km tomorrow, which means I should probably stop drinking Rose and start drinking water ....

More photos to follow!

5 comments:

Sass said...

Did H stalk you while you were out running or did you loop around?

Those photos are pretty awesome - reminds me how much beautiful countryside there is down south that I haven't seen (or run in;p)!

Mike said...

Awesome photos ... especially the one with the big cloud over the power lines. Very freaky! Looks like a great place to run. Not sure about all that snow though :)

Pip said...

Sass - I went for a run around the lake to the end of a trail, then back towards town. I was running past the campground when I had this funny feeling that Hamish was around somewhere with a camera. Sure enough, I looked to my left and there he was!

It's very, very beautiful here, but the running has been hard. My long run this morning was an epic fail. Three kilometres in the stitch kicked in. I struggled through it to 5.5km, at which the nausea hit. I made it to 6km then stood there for a while debating whether to continue. I gave in to the inevitable and turned back, making for a total of 12 kilometres, with the last six being a walk-run. I'm going to do a short bike ride tomorrow morning before we head off to a food and wine festival, then I'll try again on Monday. I haven't had stitch and nausea issues in a long time!

Ryan said...

Wonderful photos - looks like things are going well, running and biking all over the place....

Enjoy your holiday..

SixTwoThree said...

Amazing photographs! What a great trip :-)