Well, it’s been a very busy week.  Internet access is not the most reliable and can be very expensive depending on where we are… so…  here’s an update.

We arrived safely in Christchurch after many delays but with all of our luggage which is what we are focusing on.  We spent a week in Ch’church getting organized.  We signed a lease on a lovely little two bedroom cottage a block from the beach and bought a car.  We had to get used to the more laid back approach the Kiwi’s take to life so when things were not working out exactly how we’d planned there was a general, “no worries – we’ll get to it later”.  

The people are super friendly and we’ve had a blast.  The metro system in Ch’church is amazing and we were all over the city with some lovely bus drivers acting as tour guides.  

We’ve been to the Moeraki Boulders where these crazy perfectly spherical boulders stick up out of the beach and surf where we also met a lovely choc lab by the name of Havoc who met us in the parking lot and carried on with us for the whole of our visit.  Will was quite take with Havoc (they probably share the same thought patterns) and by the end of our visit he wanted to bring the dog along with us.  Havoc, I am glad to say, is home with his owners and not a fifth wheel to our adventure. We also stopped at a knitwear factory where they make the most amazing and beautiful things.  It was a bit of a back road adventure, but we found it and are glad we did – a fraction of what it was selling for in the shops in Ch’church and even down the road at a tourist stop.

Today we toured Dunedin which is on the Otago Peninsula.  The city is designed to replicate the architecture of Edinburgh, Scotland so it feels very old compared to its actual age.  Tomorrow we are headed over to the peninsula where they have an albatross colony and the protected yellow eyed penguin.  We are looking forward to it.  We will then head down (on Friday) to Invercargill on the southern tip of the south island and take a ferry over to Stewart Island.  We are considering a two day tramping around the island but will see how things go in terms of spirits among the troops.  After that we head north along the western coast to Te Anau and Milford Sound to explore Fiordland.  

Other than that we are getting used to driving on the left side of the road and as we turn left there is a chant among the navigators, “HUG THE CURB” (done in a very bad NZ accent) or to the right, “UP AND AROUND”.  

Thanks for checking out our blog.  We will try to update it more often but we are at the mercy of the Internet servers along the way and the different wireless service available to us.  Very frustrating at times, but we’re learning to deal.

 

~Sarah

Well. 

It’s been quite the experience already and we thought the adventure would be in NZ, not Canada.  We showed up nice and early Christmas morn to fly to Edmonton where we would catch a connecting flight to Vancouver, stay the night and then fly to NZ the next day.  

Apparently not.

Our flight out of Saskatoon was delayed by 6 hours(!) because Air Canada lost a crew member and had to fly in another.  We weren’t too worried considering our connecting flight out of Edmonton wasn’t for some hours and Air Canada was nice enough to switch us to a sooner flight and buy us lunch.  Le sigh.  It wasn’t meant to be.  On our arrival into Edmonton we were greeted with the news that all flights to Vancouver were cancelled but you were only privy to that information if you were fortunate to have access to a computer because the poor 2 agents that were left to deal with 300 stranded passengers on Christmas day were too overwhelmed to give us any information other than they would make an announcement as soon as they could.  Well, given the tears in these girls’ eyes and the two large RCMP who were called to guard them, we took matters into our own hands.  We booked a hotel, took a shuttle and were cosy in our beds by 9pm. We didn’t actually get through to Air Canada until 5:30 this morning but we were fortunate enough to reschedule our flight (they brought in a Boeing 777 to accommodate all the stranded passengers) and we are presently waiting in Vancouver for our flight to Auckland!  Although the delays of yesterday were the fault of Air Canada and the fact they didn’t have enough flight crew to fly us anywhere, we think that we may be seeing a little more of Vancouver than intended since (and I type this as I look out the window of the international terminal) there is a fair amount of snow coming down.  It is supposed to rain so who knows.  

And people mocked me for packing pillows!  HA!  

So that is it for now.  We’ll keep you updated and hopefully soon enough you’ll see us in all of our pastiness in shorts and flip flops.

~Sarah