Was up before seven typing this stuff - Jim's place is the sort of cold where it seems a waste of time to have a refrigerator. Too cold to properly type.
Having arranged to meet D&L at 8, we turned up at about 8:20 because we sort of assumed they would be late or something. No luck with the first bus then but the webcams from on the slopes looked gloomy. We decided to take the car to Coronet Peak and not buy lift passes until we knew we'd see some action - $90 a day for remarks so a lot to lose. We got there and there was no indication of any visibility any time soon so we headed back to get changed. I made us eggy bread while D&L went back to their hotel and read about OpenGL ES.
We then headed to Wanaka. Dad had pain in his arm half way there so I took over the driving. Accounts of what happened next vary.
About ten minutes into the drive I saw a small rock in the road and thought I was going to avoid it. The jolt a second later contradicted that somewhat but the car carried on fine until a few minutes later it was clear that all wasn't well. Other reports would include the phrase "failed to steer round a boulder", which I think is unfair. Anyhow.
We continued onwards and reached Puzzling World, Wanaka. We had a drink and snack to start with, while we sat in an area at the front where there were quite a few tables set out, each with a number of puzzles. We sat at one table and each worked through several of the puzzles, some of the fiendish and time-consuming. This was surprisingly good fun - the sort where you couldn't accurately say how much time you had spent.
After this there was an area with several rooms full of illusions. All the rooms were designed to trick the eye in some way. For instance, balls appearing to roll up a slope, because the room itself is at a tilt. Another room had sloping floors and ceilings so that people on one side looked way taller than people on the other side. And there were some standard illusion images, but overall it was much more impressive than most of these kind of things.
We went out the back of the building where there is the world's first "modern style" maze. I'm not certain what the older style of maze was like, but this one had you trying to get to certain points in order, and while there was a bridge area where you could look over the maze, this was little use because it obscured the area under it where the important turns seemed to be. It was fun, for about half an hour, then I wanted to kill myself.
We drove back to Queenstown and had pizza in Morrisons. Sleeeep.
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