Fiordland

We left the sunshine and blue skies of Okuru on the west coast of the South Island for Fiordland where deep fiords penetrate the coastal mountains, where it rains most of the time, a place so different and beautiful that it was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1990. It’s in the far southwest of the South Island, but there’s no coast road to Fiordland from Okuru. We had to drive a circuitous route inland many kilometers, then south through mountains and valleys of the Southern Alps and then west to Fiordland.

Haast River

The Road North (Part 2)

…runs through mountains and along rivers and took us from northern New Mexico to Washington state. We drove north from Taos into the San Luis Valley in Colorado and then over La Veta Pass to Interstate 25 to northern Colorado, a route we've traveled many times. Our household goods are in storage there and we stopped to swap our summer clothes for warmer jackets and rain gear.

Sawtooth Scenic Byway, Idaho

For the rest of the trip, we planned to visit parts of the country we hadn’t seen before on roads we hadn’t driven before, mostly blue highways. That term appears in the first line of the 1982 book of the same name by William Least Heat-Moon: “On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue.” He was separated from his wife, had lost his teaching job and wanted to change his life. He outfitted a van for camping and drove 13,000 miles around the country on blue highways writing about people he met and places he visited.