My husband and I are traveling in New Zealand. With a limited time for the trip, we chose mostly to fly from one place to another within the country, but the opportunity to visit an area certified by the International Dark Sky Association was too good to resist.

Let me say by way of background that we owned a home on the north shore of Block Island, Rhode Island for many years. Twelve miles off the coast, we were able to see the stars. So many stars! The Milky Way, even. Nighttime was beautiful there. Some years ago, we moved to the West Coast of the USA and gave up this vacation home. In our suburban location, we are lucky, on a clear night, to see Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and maybe, just maybe a few of the brightest stars. We began to forget our lost nighttime sky.

Researching our trip, we learned that New Zealand has a number of dark-sky sanctuaries and reserves. One of them was located between Queenstown and Christchurch–and it was possible to stay the night. We reserved a car in Queenstown, to be returned the next day in Christchurch. And we reserved a “skybed” at Skyscape.

Yes, you are seeing correctly: This building is a single bedroom with a deck and a *glass roof* through which you can lie in bed and watch the sky grow dark and the stars blossom.

There were clouds, but only in places. In other places, the sky was clear and as civil twilight turned to nautical twilight and then to astronomical twilight, the stars came out in their millions.

The following day, after we drove to Christchurch and settled in there, I wanted to thank my husband for all his fearless and excellent driving–three hours from Queenstown to Skyscape, and then four hours to Christchurch, all of it on the “wrong” side of the road. I told him how much it meant to me to see the stars again, and to my surprise, I found myself in tears.

I had no idea how much the sight of the infinite universe means to me. How much we city-dwellers have lost.