The Benvenue Motor Inn Timaru

This morning, we woke up, had beans for breakfast and helped to clean up Chris and Janet's house. Then, Janet dropped all the teams off just out of town at about 11:30 so we could begin hitchhiking back toward Oxford. Our team prayed and decided to head north with the goal of Timaru. We ended up walking for about 2 hours before getting picked up, and all the other teams had already passed us in cars, but I really enjoyed the walk and spending some ...

... and the stuff on Mars, and Black Holes is particularly interesting. As it gets dark we get to the van and get some food as we have booked ourselves on a stargazing 'tour' for the evening. We are lucky to have a perfectly clear night in which the moon doesn't show itself til later on, making it perfect for viewing the stars. As we go to the deck with the telescopes we look up and see the milky way as i have never seen it. A vast band across the sky almost bright enough to see by on the ground ...

... fun! This morning we got up and headed SW to the village of Mt. Cook. This village is incredibly beautiful -- made up of huge mountains and beautiful blue glacier water. We stopped and enjoyed Lake Tekapo for a little while... teh bluest water I have ever seen and then headed to Mt. Cook for a glacier cruise to ,look at and understand the glacial process. I jumped into water that was 2 degress celsius (35F ...

... free wifi. The difference in this journey was that Chris drove the van for the first time and found that it wasn't nearly as scary as she had feared! When we arrived at the camp-site, we cooked dinner while drinking some wine and then Skyped Chris's mum who had Chris's brothers staying with her. The conversation lasted a long time and I'm not sure we were making a whole lot of sense by the end, but it was nice to talk to the brothers too. The next day we moved on, heading for ...

By the time we'd left Millford and got to Queenstown it was like another day with blue skies & sight of the sun. We stopped en route in Arrowtown (2nd visit) to show Greg the place and the lure of the bakery pies was proving to be too much. Before hand we had been lucky (?!?) enough to watch a bungy jump from the original AJ Hackett bridge - one poor guy hit the water face first and had a nose ...

... are only six television channels and two of them show non-stop rugby. Their game show hosts are too slow-they'd last one episode on American television. You don't rent anything; you "hire" it. Parking lots are called car parks. There are no shoulders on most of the roads and on the steepest drop-offs there are no guard rails. I've yet to see a gasoline pump where you can swipe your credit card at the pump itself. There is virtually no Pepsi, only Coke. There ...

Well, we had a one hour trip to the gym this morning, to make up for no gym yesterday. This was followed by a quite bite at The Daily Grind and then a wander around Christchurch. Natalie updated the blog; Natasha visited the Cathedral. Next, we were on our way to Lake Tekapo. Two and a half hours driving through amazing countryside...and we found the Lake, We stopped and Natalie thought ...

After leaving Kaikoura we made a huge push and drove for like 4-5 more hours. We made it past Christchurch and nearly to Mt. Cook (which was the goal for the next day). In the morning we got up and drove to see Lake Tekapo, Lake Pukaki, and Mt. Cook. Jenn and I had previously done this part of the trip but Sue had never seen it so we took her. Mt. Cook is always beautiful and a treat to see. We drove into Mt. Cook National Park and decided to do a ...

... Meals in Japan always have a ppetiser included in the price and they were always just tastes and excellently prepared. In Tokyo food could be extremely expensive or not. There was always a noodle shop around the corner. Wine was hard to find but there were plenty of mixed drinks. We were served salted roasted peas in the bars with our drinks. Bread is not part of the Japanese diet so all you can find is fat white bread in the restaurants ...

... of rocks situated on a windswept beach in the middle of nowhere. I think I blame the marketing people, and the guide book people. The language used to describe a lot of NZ's tourist attractions is often much more interesting than the attraction itself. To be sure, they have some amazing sights in this country. I loved East Cape, which is criminally overlooked by most travellers. Napier is a very beautiful Art ...