The Otago is New Zealand’s original rail trail in their Great Rides initiative. It’s 160km and we wanted to do it all so we’ve made arrangements with one of the many trail service companies to transport our luggage and line up accommodations. Day 1: Clyde to Lauder (47km) That should have been 44km but we burned an extra 3 …

 As we left Clyde heading for Te Anau, we had to swing by Clyde’s historic cardboard village created for their 150th anniversary celebration. We were still packing leftovers from the prior days packed lunch supplied by the Waipiata Hotel so we pulled into a rest stop along the road that just happened to show up around lunch time. Pretty …

Monday, October 22nd After the amazing round-trip to Milford Sound on Sunday we came back to our holiday park standard cabin/renovated container and packed an overnight bag for our cruise on Doubtful Sound. We didn’t need to check in for the cruise until noon, so we did some shopping and grabbed a coffee in Te Anau before the 20-minute drive …

We spent the night in Owaka so it was just a couple of hours to our next base in Dunedin, the second largest city on the South Island. On the way we made a quick stop in Gore. One of the crew on the fiordland cruise was amused to see the name Thomas Green because there was a pub in …

Now it’s mostly a long drive and ferry crossing to get back to Auckland and home. Saturday, 27 October: Dunedin to Amberley. Only one sight-seeing stop today at Moeraki Boulders, about an hour north of Dunedin. There are dozens of spherical boulders (actually concretions – the dictionary word of the day) as singles or in large groupings. Sunday, 28 October: …

The Plan As you can see from the map of our travels we were in every region of the country except for the far east (Gisborne) and far west (Taranaki) of the North Island. We stayed at least one full day and night in every region as well except for Manawatu-Wanganui, the region immediately north of Wellington. The plan was …