Flights Booked, Bags not so packed.

So we finally bought our flights home! We’ve been looking here and there recently, and found an absolute bargain so figured we better grab them! It was like $500 dollars less that we’d seen anywhere else, and yes the flight is 30 hours long, but we get to take 2 bag @ 23kg each which means we’ll be able to get our snowboard gear through real cheap! (Just have to buy the bags).

Making The Most of NZ

So, as our time runs out, we’ve suddenly started realising that there’s so much here we haven’t done, so we’re doing the best to get the most out of where we are, hitting the slopes as often as we can (and as hard as we can in reference to my lastest fall hitting a rail at Remarks’).

We’re also planning to do some more exciting things around here if we find the time and money, we’d love to do the Shotover Jet (which I get free), and possibly a Bungy jump.

Forward Planning

I’ve never been one to plan, and to that effect no specifics are in place as of yet, there’s still two months until we leave, but ideas are flying around, we’ve had visit invitations from pretty much every corner of the world from Canada, to Peru, Australia and Sweden.

We’d love to go everywhere, visit everyone, and see the world, unfortunately our current funding won’t quite support that, so it might be a few months before we’re off again, lucky for us the pound is still the strongest currency on the planet so it shouldn’t be too long till we have enough. Maybe I could get some web-development work (hint hint).

We leave on the 24th of October, 2008

The Recommended Links [Part 2]

The Bathhouse Restaurant

The Bathhouse Restaurant is a fantastic lakeside restaurant, aimed at a fine-dining experience.

The Bathhouse’s old website was ugly to say the least, it was one of those Microsoft Publisher websites with horribly textured buttons, and horrendously poor quality photos.

The brief was; to design a simple and sleek website that was easy to navigate, and could hold plenty of content.

After having some discussions with the Creative Director, we came up with a very simple, dark theme, using 2 fonts that she’d chosen. Unfortunately for me, the fonts she wanted to use aren’t standard web-fonts, which means either flash or images :(.

Due to simplicity and the fact that she is experienced in Photoshop, we went with images, after resizing, resampling, rewording and some redesigning, we managed to put together the site.

Some issues arose when the owner wished to add more pages and we had to recreate the menu to fit in the new links, and merge some pages together, but it went fairly smoothly.

I whipped up a simple contact, reservations and contests system which does the job, and the site is now a dynamic, informative hub for the little round restaurant on the lakeside.

The Bathhouse Restauarant, Queenstown, New Zealand
The Bathhouse Restauarant, Queenstown, New Zealand

SNOW!

So amazingly, we finally had a massive dump of snow here in Queenstown!

It’s been a while so this fresh powder is most welcome and Queenstown has suddenly come alive again, the mountain was packed, though with such a large fall, we could board anywhere on the mountain and we’d fall knee deep in fresh powder, so we managed to keep away from the crowds (luckily the schools were still open).

Unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone to cover my shift at work, so I had to get down the mountain for 4pm, luckily my cheese on toast making skills are second to none, so having a shower at the same time was easy. Completely jealous of Joie who stayed up the mountain to do night skiing – which should be bloody awesome because of the snow.

Ah well, I guess sitting at work isn’t all that bad… wait, yes it is.

Pictures soon!