Day 8 in New Zealand: I Meet a Glacier

This day is all about mountain hiking and meeting a glacier.

But first--breakfast!

Serving pancake stacks at the cafe across the street from Pancake Rocks is pretty much the best synergy I've ever seen. OBVIOUSLY we simply had to have them!

Also, flat whites:

Fun fact: I now want a twinkle light kiwi sooooo badly, but probably not badly enough to change up my electrical outlet for it...

It was another beautiful drive, snugged between the mountain and the sea, down to Westland Tai Poutini National Park, where the goal was to introduce our kid to her very first glacier.

Hopefully she'll see many more in her life, but just in case they all melt before she can, she'll always have the memory of Franz Josef Glacier.

I was surprised to discover that you can actually see the Franz Josef Glacier from the parking lot!

Honestly, that's not a bad option if you've got some other hikes that you'd rather do, because the view isn't *that* much better from where the most popular walk ends at the Trident Creek Falls, but still. If 3000 meters is as close as you can get, then 3000 meters is where we're going!

Fortunately, this early in the day the weather was PERFECT for hiking--

--AND for seeing a real, live glacier from just 3000 meters away!

It's kind of a bummer, though, when you look at that long plain of gravel and you realize that if it hadn't melted, Franz Josef glacier would actually be right THERE where you could touch it. Sigh...

We wanted to do another hike in the area while the weather was so nice, so we decided to follow Roberts Point Track to the first of the cool swing bridges I'd read about.

Peters Pool was just as prettily reflective as we'd been told it would be, although you could see that the weather was already changing...

But it was still lovely and light when we got to the first swing bridge on the trail:

My partner isn't much for swing bridges over glacial streams, so he hung back and took our pretty pictures while we enjoyed the bridge crossing:

The big kid and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, however. This was our best look at the "glacial flour" that makes the rivers coming from the glacier look so milky:

On the far side of the bridge, we spent a little time looking around while a few other hikers crossed--

--and then we all enjoyed the hike back, especially when the glacier came back into view. 

This was such an exciting warning sign! 

The weather later that afternoon didn't feel workable for the whole Fox Glacier walk, so instead we drove over to this viewpoint outside of town. It was pretty overcast, but fortunately we could still see enough of Fox Glacier to say we'd seen it:

Definitely too overcast to see Mount Cook, though, which was kind of a bummer:

The evening's major adventure was more prosaic: repack all our crap so we could all fly home the day after tomorrow! My partner hadn't been very impressed by my purchase of this luggage scale, but omg did it come in handy, because he was VERY impressed (in a horrified way...) of my purchase of books and crow-like scavenging of lovely rocks over our trip. We had to divvy up the books and the rocks to keep my luggage from being overweight, and we further divided up the delicious snacks so that if someone's bag got lost, perhaps not all of our Whittakers and Cadbury and wine would be. And then I had to practically sit on the kid to convince her not to leave behind her foul weather rainsuit, she was so sick of it, but I'm sorry to say that I could not save her rain boots. I hope that they're happy on the feet of some other New Zealand adventurer right this minute.

Ah, well. I'm sure she'll regret it when she says she needs rain boots for the next round of bizarre environmental scientist antics that she's currently applying to and I tell her that I already bought her perfectly nice rain boots so the next pair is on her, humph.

All packed up and ready to go, we await tomorrow's adventure: the TranzAlpine Train across the Southern Alps!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Rotorua

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 7 in New Zealand: To the South Island, and Then We Kept Going South

Time has no meaning, because honestly it was zero problem to hop up at 4:15 am and drive through a sleeping Wellington to the Interislander Ferry. 

Really, I preferred it. There's no traffic to fight at 4:15 am!

My favorite thing about riding in a ferry is how well you're herded. I genuinely love nothing better than driving nose to tail at 3 miles per hour in a single line, and at every decision point there's a friendly figure in a high-vis vest to tell me exactly what to do. It's so stress-free not to have to think for myself!

I'm not much of a sailor, and I'd heard that the Cook Strait can be very rough, so as soon as the captain came on the intercom and said that our passage would "not be optimal," omg I started popping the Dramamine like they were Pez.

Not so my beloved and loving partner. Just as he does in every situation in which his spouse might desire comfort, entertainment, and distraction (*cough, cough* 14-hour flight *cough*), he found a seat, sat in it, and proceeded to fall deeply asleep, ne'er to awaken until the announcement came 3+ hours later that it was time to get back to our cars:

We have barely pulled out of the dock, and the man is sound asleep.

Fortunately, we had a bit of time before we actually entered the Cook Strait for me to enjoy myself:

Eventually, however, they closed the outside deck and began to make periodic announcements that people should vomit in a baggie and not in the ferry toilets, and so I spent the next good long while sitting at the furthest window forward and watching the bow go up and down, periodically overdosing on Dramamine and thinking VERY firmly to myself that I was not going to vomit.

Also, I'd left my earbuds in my other fucking bag. Not all adventures are pleasant!

Also also, Cook Strait IS genuinely notorious. I wasn't just being a baby!

I swear to god I about kissed the ground when we arrived in Picton, but above all, we must carry on with the sightseeing, so rather than engage in my most preferred activity of the moment, which was to die, we instead bought some Christmas candy at a local candymaker, and did a wine tasting and bought some wine at a local winemaker:

I actually just finished that bottle of wine a couple of nights ago, and I miss it! I don't normally love white wines, but this one was very nice. Also, fun fact: instead of a tasting room, the New Zealand wineries have a "cellar door." More semantic translation fun!

So... it may have been after-effects of the seasickness, or it may have been jetlag, or to be honest I definitely overdosed on Dramamine in an anxious panic there on the Cook Strait, so it may have been that, but after we got back in the car I dunno what happened for a good long while. I just sort of greyed out, and when I was back online we were on the coast!

Did we even eat lunch at some point? I really have no fucking idea. All I really recall from the entire drive from Hunter's Winery to the coast is that in this rental car, every time we turned it on it would connect to my phone via Bluetooth, which was AWESOME because there was a screen that would display my Google Maps on the dash for my partner to see. Do newer American cars do that, too? I wouldn't know, because our personal American cars are a billion years old, ahem. Anyway, when it did that, it would also for some reason connect to my Spotify and just start playing the Fleet Foxes radio playlist, which... is fine, I guess? I mean, it was almost Thanksgiving at that point, which means that White Winter Hymnal is pretty much required daily consumption. But also, that playlist is less than three hours long, and it came on EVERY time we started the car, and played continuously the entire time we were in the car, and the couple of times I tried to turn it off, or even to change playlists, it fucked up the GPS so my partner suddenly couldn't see where he was going in the middle of traffic, so I eventually was too scared to touch it and we just listened to Fleet Foxes radio whenever we were in the car. So ANYWAY, I'm not sure what else happened during that drive, but what I recall from it is just sort of a Fleet Foxes, and Fleet Foxes adjacent, sense memory. 

This Vampire Weekend song is very good, by the way. I heard it maybe 1,000 times over the nine days we were in New Zealand?

Oh, you know what, you guys? I have literally just had the realization that I probably should NOT have chased 3+ Dramamine with a couple of glasses of wine at 11:00 am. Whatever, it's fine. Neither of my travel companions can remember whether or not we had a proper lunch that day, either, and neither of them were compromised.

By the time we reached the trailhead for the Cape Foulwind Seal Colony Lookout (three and a half hours later, ahem...), I was more or less fine-ish and ready for a nice hike in the brisk fresh air!

The hike was almost exactly as was described--there were no "foul" winds (although it was VERY windy... was that what they meant by "foul?"), but there were rocks, and there was a lookout, and from the lookout, we could see seals on the rocks!

There is no soap opera that can match the drama of seals fighting over nothing on their rocks:

The drive down the coast afterwards was breathtaking (my partner states that the drive across the island was also breathtaking, particularly the part that followed the river, but I have no memory of this), and we got to our last stop at Punakaiki at just the right time, right at high tide so we could see the blowholes near the Pancake Rocks:

Lol at the photo below, because I was fighting for my life on those stairs!

Our hotel was in a beautiful spot sandwiched between the cliffs and the beach, and the kid and I had a lovely, long walk along that beach before it started spitting down rain again. We had a delicious, hot pub dinner, long, hot showers, and we were going to try to find a movie on the local cable, but I fell asleep before it even got started.

Tomorrow, we see the glaciers!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Rotorua

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 3 in New Zealand: From SEA to Sulfur

The best sight in all of New Zealand is the Robert C. Seamans anchored at the Halsey Street Wharf in Auckland:

She'd arrived the previous day while my partner and I were sitting down to the Lord of the Rings Musical, but because the kid's cell phone was completely dead we didn't know it, and we spent a bit of the next morning wandering down Quay Street until we were both like, "Hey, does that look like a tall ship that serves as an oceanographic research station to YOU?"

It did, and it was!

Below is the photo I took when, after several minutes of looky-looing, taking photos, and indulging in the occasional enthusiastic waving, someone on deck apparently finally went around the ship to ask, "So... is it possible that someone's mom is here?" My kid seems to have come clean that indeed, it was possible that it was her mom giving off the big mom energy, she came up to verify, and I got my first sight of her in nearly two months!

Ignore everyone else on the ship laughing openly at me. I was excited!

Fortunately, my looky-looking and enthusiastic picture-taking also called attention to my proper camera, and I'm pretty sure my kid's response, when someone asked her if I'd want to come over and take a group photo of everyone on the ship, was something like, "Go ahead and ask her, but if you get her started she'll never stop," because someone DID come over and ask me, and I DID take a billion photos, both staged and spontaneous.

And then because I was already over there I indeed did NOT stop:

We didn't have big plans for the day, other than getting our girl back. We browsed a grocery store because local snacks are also the kid's favorite thing about traveling, and then hit up a bakery for flat whites and these little savory pies that were ubiquitous everywhere we went. They were delicious and filling, but OMG the crumbs! How are New Zealanders not constantly covered in crumbs?

Afterwards, it was a leisurely four-hour drive to Rotorua, with plenty of time to stop and look at Maori sights, eat ice cream, and gaze at sheep standing picturesquely on hill and pasture:

In the early afternoon, we checked into our hotel in Rotorua, then had to sort out getting all the kid's clothes washed (she'd been washing everything by hand for nearly two months...) and buying her a new duffel bag. I TOLD her that her IKEA Frakta, handy as it was for moving back and forth between dorm room and bedroom, was not sturdy enough to fly to Fiji as her checked bag, but Lord knows nobody ever listens to their mother! The thing had apparently been falling apart BEFORE she checked it in for her flight, so I gather she just wrapped a ton of tape that she somehow snookered away from an airport employee around it and, well, here it is begging for death and insisting very fervently that it will not hold together for ten more feet, much less across the entirety of New Zealand and then halfway across the world:

Anyway, did you know that K-Mart is still thriving in New Zealand? And their duffel bags were a terrific price, so the kid no longer has an excuse to look like she rides the rails on the way to the next Hoover Town. Also all their Christmas stuff was amazing. I am legitimately so mad at myself that I did not buy the pink sweater vest with Christmas buns on it, but all I can say for myself is that I was overstimulated and my unhelpful partner kept asking me unhelpful questions like, "Where will you wear that?" and "Where will we put that?" and "Do we need that?"

Yes, MATT. YES I DO NEED A RED SUIT JACKET AND MATCHING DRESS PANTS WITH SANTA HEADS ALL OVER THEM, AND SO DO YOU.

I swear, next time I am in another country when they have their Christmas stuff out and it's all amazing and the exchange rate is in my favor, nothing will stop me!

Thanks to the laundromat, we finally got an excuse to check out the cool New Zealand money:

That was our ice cream money for the rest of the trip!

The entire area is geothermically active, so fortunately, in between errands and chores, there was actually plenty to sightsee. This geothermal vent is literally in the backyard of our hotel!

When we were driving around town, we actually saw a ton of these in people's yards. A hole in the ground would be merrily steaming away in somebody's side yard, with a little fence around it!

Our hotel also had its own geothermal-heated hangi that we did not cook in, but my partner did almost burn his face off with it, so that's nearly as cool:

If I had a literal geothermal-powered oven in my backyard my gas bill would be nearly non-existent, because I would cook EVERYTHING in my magical earth steam.

Here's the area from a distance--we're inside a giant ancient caldera!

But here's what it looks like close up, just a short walk from our hotel:

I swear we are incapable of going anywhere without stopping and grubbing on the ground:

But to be fair, this beach in particular is good for grubbing, because it has hot spots. If you're walking and you see a wisp of steam coming up from the sand, you can stop and dig there, and the hole that you dig will fill itself with hot water. 

If you bring a proper shovel, you can did a hole big enough to sit in and have your own personal hot tub, but we didn't have shovels, so we just used our hands to dig little hot tubs for our fingies:

If I had it to do over again, I'd probably have chosen to spend the late afternoon and evening sightseeing around Rotorua, but when I was planning the trip I got Influenced by everyone's travel photos and booked us tickets at a geothermal day spa. To be fair, it was just as relaxing and comfy as the travel bloggers said it would be, but you know how I am, and there were so many things in Rotorua that I. Did. Not. SEE!

Ah, well. I have to go back, anyway, to get my Christmas bun sweater vest, so I'll see the rest of the geothermal wonders of Rotorua then. And this hot pool *is* the first time that one muscle in my back relaxed since I tweaked it on the flight in, so there's that:

I also now know what a foot reflexology walk is and I swear to god I am NEVER doing that bullshit again! The kid and I went on it together, and I'm pretty sure she thought she was going to have to go get her dad to carry me out, I was in so much pain. Seriously, though--WHAT THE FUCK. I even Googled later "Why does a foot reflexology walk hurt so much," and the answers were pretty much, "Probably because your entire body sucks," so I guess at least now I know!

Just in case it was my liver's fault, I bribed it with some more Scrumpy along with our takeaway:

Tomorrow, we're going to see glowworms! And KIWI!!!!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!