on our way

Blogging will be harder and harder from here on out, not that I've been eating up New Zealand's network lines with the frequency of my posts anyway. But in less than a week our laptop will be headed home, and we'll be on the road with no telling how often we'll be stopping to log on.

I will get some updates up before we leave NZ on what we've been doing (cramming in tourist stuff - skiing, bungy, walking on glaciers) and perhaps even some reflections on finishing our year here (although that's the last thing on my mind - instead I'm thinking about our crazy four months of traveling ahead).

For now, I'll give a brief geographical update (I'm in an Internet cafe and paying by the minute)...

We've left Queenstown after 10 days or so. Queenstown may be a tourist destination, but it's still a wonderful place to be. You couldn't ask for a more scenic location, nestled against the shore of a lake underneath two rows of mountains. I love the town, and loved to spend time with some friends (and crash on their floor; much cheaper than a hostel) but it's easy to spend a lot of money in Queenstown. Still, a bit sorry to leave.
On Thursday we loaded our stuff in the car once again and headed up the West Coast of the South Island to the Glaciers. There's two easily accessible Glaciers within 20 miles of each other, coming off the top off the Southern Alps and falling toward the ocean. They don't quite make it all the way to the coast, but they do come from about 11,000 feet all the way to 300 or 500 feet above sea level, just a few miles from the ocean (one of the crazy things I still haven't gotten used to in this country is just how close the mountains and sea are. I read a story about someone who climbed Mt. Cook, NZ's tallest mountain at a bit more than 12,000 feet. He started at the ocean coast, and made it to the summit in five or six days).
You can walk on the glaciers, as long as you're willing to pay a company for a guided group tour (they supply the boots and crampons). We'd been to the glaciers before, just after the New Year, but hadn't gotten to do the hike so it was one of the things we wanted to get back to before we left. We got great weather, and the experience was definitely worth the trip.
Now we're outside Chirstchurch in Methven, hoping to get a few more days of skiing in. Today was supposed to be a ski (or snowboard, I might try that for a few days) but the wind was too bad. We'll try again tomorrow.

Then just about one week - Aug. 7 - until we fly to Australia.