This post is brought to you by: Strife and Anguish

Today has not been a whole a lot of fun, but tomorrow is not today, so it will all work out in the end.

The train was not as cool as the hype suggested it would be: we somehow got put in the one car that did not have spacious seats (there was about as much room as in a coach class plane seat), but there was no real place to put carry-on bags (which we did not know when we were checking the other bags), so we got to spend four hours buried in our bags. The scenery was nice, when it was not obscured by clouds.

We were supposed to be greeted by a rental car company representative, but the train was a half hour early, so we had to cool our heels for a while until he showed up with the new rental car. When he did show up he informed us that the damage to the tire done when that curb attacked the car was not covered under the additional insurance that we purchased at no small amount per day. We are both rather confused by this as we thought that the insurance plan that we chose explicitly covered all damage to tires, wheels, windshields, and headlights. We will try to sort things out tomorrow when we drop this car off before jumping onto a plane to Rotorua.

Even getting an internet connection in the room tonight was a tortuous process. It would not work at all, but before we could get someone to try to fix it we first had to get the hotel to send someone to get the phone to work, as there was no dial tone and the network here is run by an off site company. Once the phone was working, I called the tech support line (it caused me actual physical pain to call tech support while on vacation) twice.

The first person I talked to I will refer to as "Skippy". Skippy was utterly useless and kept having me do things in Internet Explorer when the problem was that the computer could not get an IP address. A second call connected me with someone, Rodger, I think, who actually knew what he was about and had the problem fixed (a problem on their end, not mine) in a couple of minutes. Thank you Rodger (if that is your name).

As promised, here are some pictures of us on the glacier:

Fox Glacier

Yesterday we headed out of Queenstown for Fox Glacier, where we were scheduled to go on a half-day hike up onto the glacier (the Kiwis pronounce glacier "glace-ier" rather than "glaysher").

On our way out of Queenstown, we spotted a hitchhiker holding a sign for Wanaka, which was the first major stop on our projected five hours of driving for the day. On a spur of the moment, we decided to pull over and give her a lift. After shifting the debris in the back seat a bit, we made room for her and were off to Wanaka.

Jane, as she is called, is a sound engineer from London that has been spending the last couple of months travelling around NZ as she felt the whim. We had a fascinating discussion with her during the hour long trip to Wanaka and dropped her off before we looked for parking and lunch.

Just outside of Wanaka, as we entered the city, was an establishment that we could not help but visit: Puzzling World. Inside there were several rooms devoted to really impressive optical illusions and a room of cool holographic photos. Outside was a rather impressive two floor maze (the second floor consisted of a series of bridges connecting distant parts of the maze).

The maze had four color coded towers and the challenge for the maze was to find all four towers (in any order for the easy challenge or in a specific order for the hard challenge) and then find the way out. We chose to do the easy challenge, as we still had four hours of driving to go, which was listed as taking 30 to 60 minutes. After some frustration with the dastardly green tower, we made it out in a quite respectible 45 minutes.

The next four hours were pretty much straight driving, with Jen and I trading off driving duties. We stopped briefly to walk up to the Thunder Falls and again to catch the sun setting over the Tasman Sea. There was a near miss with a Pukeko and an incident with an opposum and our right front wheel (that one was for the kiwis and other endangered flightless birds of NZ) after night fell. Our current accommidation is the Misty Mountains Lodge, a lovely little B&B just on the edge of the Fox Glacier township. We have not seen any hobbits or dwarves yet, but I am still optimistic.

On the recommendation of the proprietress, we went to a little restaurant called The Platau. The food was great: I had chorzo sausage, feta cheese, and mushrooms on penne and Jen had NZ green lipped muscles in a chili-ginger-lime sauce. We both tried a new (for us) brand of beer: Moa. Jen had the Moa Blanc (a spicey wheat beer) and I had the Moa Noir (a very chocolately dark ale). Both were excellent, bottle-fermented brews.

We were up early this morning for breakfast (standard fare: fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes - the Kiwis know how to do breakfast) and then were off to the guide station to begin our hike.

Our tour gide was a former Mt. Everest sherpa from Nepal named Passang who was quite entertaining and hopped about the steep, narrow, rocky, wet, slippery trails like some sort of spry mountain alpaca. Or possibly a sherpa. The glacier itself was spectacular; we got to hike out onto it with crampons strapped onto our boots and specially made walking sticks (they had a metal bit at the end to stab into the ice) to assist us.

The trail (parts of it barely qualify for the word, but I'm feeling generous today) was quite difficult in places and the company that ran the tours had people out rebuilding parts of the trail that had recently been destroyed by landslides or flash floods. Jen and I will both be quite sore tomorrow. Fortunately, we only have a relaxing three and a half hour drive to Greymouth and then an alpine train back to Christchurch scheduled for tomorrow.

We'll post some pictures of the glacier when we get internet access from the laptop, we're using the computer in the B&B front room right now.

Been there, done that, got the (free!) t-shirt

Yesterday we went bungy jumping. Both of us survived intact, and we did, actually get a free t-shirt. We got a DVD with both of our jumps on it, but I do not know how to get video off of a DVD for uploading somewhere like YouTube so that you can all see it. You will all have to wait until we get back to see us screaming in abject terror during the several seconds of free fall. It was great.

After the jump we went to the local endangered wild bird sanctuary and got to see a bunch of local species that have not been doing so well since the stupid Europeans brought their rats, ferrets, and stoats to NZ. We got to see a couple of frisky kiwis, some cheeky keas (a large parrot, about the size of a duck) and the enormous native pigeon, which looks like a Thanksgiving turkey with a wee pigeon head.

After dinner at an Italian place with a cat obsession, we went to the mini golf place up the road, which had a whole bunch of really complicated and elaborate models to play around. It was one of the harder putt-putt courses I have played: final score was Scott 91, Jen 94 (92 if we had enforced the 10 stroke limit per hole).

We have to pack up now and head to Fox Glacier, which will be a 4-5 hour drive. Perhaps when we get there I'll have time to upload some pictures of the birds and the mini golf place.

On to Queenstown!

Yesterday morning we decided to do one last short walk before getting on the road and heading for Queenstown. A quick look in the guide book indicated that there should be a 30 minute walk along Frasers Beach that should give us some nice views. So we loaded up the car and drove 20 minutes to what we thought was the start of the walk.

This, however, was no nice, wide, sandy beach like we found at Cannibal Bay. Oh no. This beach was all loose rocks ranging from golf ball sized on up to mid sized boulders. This may or may not seem like a big deal, unless you have ever tried to walk on loose stones. About an hour of hard hiking across loose stones, over fields of Technicolor algae seeping out of the rock, through packs of vicious dire opossums, and much ankle peril, we finally made it to our final destination: Pearl Harbor.





Pearl Harbor was a bit of a disappointment, what with the complete lack of pearls and the overabundance of tour groups departing from the harbor on various cruises. There was, however, one thing of interest to us: the actual trail that we were supposed to take.

You see, the trail between Frasers Beach and Pearl Harbor did not start right where you first got off of the highway by the sign that says "Frasers Beach". The trail starts about a kilometer down the road next to another sign that says "Frasers Beach". Needless to say, the walk back was much less perilous.

Once back to the car, Jen declared that she wanted to try driving. Being the sporting chap that I am, I agreed that this would be a smashing place for her to try left side driving as we were in a fairly deserted, low traffic area (my own experience of trying to figure things out as I went when driving in a city indicated that this would be a much easier way to learn).

Twenty moderately terrifying minutes later we pulled into the Moose Bar and Restaurant in Te Anau, where we had decided to have lunch. It was not that Jen's driving was terrifying (in fact, she did much better than I did at staying in the lane at first), it was the sitting in the passenger seat while someone else figured out how to drive on the wrong side of the road. I told her that I was quite impressed that she hadn't screamed more when I was driving in Christchurch.

After a quick lunch in The Moose we were off to Queenstown. The drive was uneventful but pretty. I started to get fatigued, so Jen took another spell driving about half way through and remained at the helm until we got near the city, where I took over again.



We found our accommodation here in Queenstown without much drama. We are staying at a lodge about 50 meters from the start of the down town strip. Let me fill you in a bit about Queenstown: it is the "Adventure Capital" of NZ*. Just about every adventury thing you would want to do can be done in this town: bungy jumping, hang gliding, white water rafting, paragliding, jet boating, etc. It is also central to several ski areas in the mountains in this area.

Needless to say the city attracts a demographic that is a bit younger and more exuberant than, say, the Fiordland National Park. There are lots of hip little bars and cafes and about a third of the commercial establishments here deal with adventure sporting in one way or another. Some book trips, others sell supplies, others sell hipster clothing proclaiming the extreme sports adventuring life style. It is a very interesting city, very different from Te Anau. All that being said, our accommodation here seem a bit more like a dorm room than a hotel. Very small, somewhat ugly decorations, and thin walls make us feel like we are on spring break somewhere that you can't drink the water.



Since last night was our 1 week anniversary, we decided to head someplace nice for dinner. After consulting the tour guides, we decided on a place called The Bath House, which is apparently an old bath house that has been converted into a swanky restaurant. Unfortunately, it is closed on Mondays, which we only found out by walking there and seeing the dark building.

Strike One.

We then stood around the entrance to the Bath House and advertised our status as "Dumb American Tourists" by whipping out the tour book and trying to find a backup. The next fanciest place looked to be a place called The Bunker, which was somewhat ambiguously located on the map. After a couple of minutes walking around a back ally, we finally found the door and entered. It was a quaint little place with lots of character and only a couple of tables. All of which were full and would not be free for over an hour.

Strike Two.

Understandably flummoxed by the uselessness of the tour book, we decided to fall back on the old reliable "Pick a Place at Random and Eat There" method of restaurant location. A couple of doors down the ally from The Bunker was the back door to a little joint called Surreal. In we went and managed to snag a table for two, whose romantic atmosphere was slightly marred because the candle on the table had previously been extinguished by the wind coming in from the open door. We still don't know why they had the doors propped open, as it was quite chilly (about 10 C).

Fortunately we were bundled against the weather and simple left a couple of layers on. Jen had pork roasted in milk and honey on a bed of kumara and potatoes. I had a Mediterranean stir fry which was pine-nut free on the second try. I have never had feta cheese in a stir fry before, but it worked quite well and I will have to try it once I get back to the States. Ordering drinks was amusing: I had to explain how to make an Amaretto Sour, which Jen ordered, to the bar tender. He also had an interesting interpretation of a Manhattan; I think he added Grenadine. The martini, however, was excellent and straight out of a Bond movie (although I think 007 gets his with a twist, whereas I prefer an olive).

After dinner, our plans for heading to one of the trendy bars were dashed by the reality of our exhaustion from our earlier ordeal on Frasers Beach, so we headed back to the lodge and turned in. Since the place at which we are staying is not a B&B, we were somewhat relieved to find ourselves on our own for breakfast - that meant that we could sleep in a bit, which we did. We had brunch at a small cafe and then headed back to the room to get ready for our adventure of the day: kayaking on the lake.

Neither of us have done any kayaking before, so we didn't really know what to wear. The answer, of course, was to go with a bunch of layers. We were picked up by Glenn, who was our guide for the afternoon and is quite a character. He has been a guide of one sort or another in Queenstown for the last 20 years and just started the kayaking business with some other people in October.

Those of you who are used to Michigan would be astounded to hear that the lake here is almost completely unused by boaters. It is this huge, gorgeous lake surrounded on all sides by towering mountains, and there were a total of four boats on the lake today, two of which were our kayaks (Jen and I were in a two-person kayak, Glenn was in his own).



Glenn entertained us along the way with tidbits of the history of NZ and the Queenstown area. Some of the tidbits were a moderately embellished, such as when he told us that, back before the Maori hunted them to extinction, the moas (an ostrich sized flightless bird) towered above the trees. Also, there was something about a kind of eagle that hunted people which the Maori counter-hunted to extinction by baiting the eagle with a live person.

The highlight of the afternoon, though, was when we pulled off to the side and had tea in the rain while sitting in our kayaks. That may be something of a quintessential Kiwi experience, but you may need to work sheep in there somehow for it to really sum up the country.





Once back in town, both Jen and I were feeling the lack of anything substantial to eat throughout the day, so we changed out of our wet clothes and headed out to find a place to eat. We stumbled upon a bar called the Red Rock which looked to have a bit of character and headed inside. Jen had a salad of some kind and I had beef nachos, which were not in any way spicy, but were instead served with a sweet fruit chutney on top. Not quite authentic TexMex, but quite good. When we were ordering our drinks, I, in my never ending quest to find good beer wherever I go, asked the bartender what the Tiu beer that they had on tap was like. Her response was essentially "If you are asking how a beer is, you won't like Tiu, but here's a taste anyway". She was right, of course, it was a Bud/Miller/Coors style beer.

Both Jen and I went with Monteith's again (she the Redler and I the Ale). Apparently I got quite lucky when I picked Monteith's at random from the beer list on that first night in Christchurch, as we have yet to find another beer as good (though the Pitch Black Stout that Jen had at Milford was right up there).

After dinner we decided on the extreme sport adventure thing that we are going to don while here: we booked a bungy jump for tomorrow at 11:45. Once that was booked, we did a bit of souvenir shopping, and then returned to the lodge to do some laundry, which I am checking on periodically while I write here.

And on that note, we're pretty much caught up on what has been happening here.

* - I wanted to find a local tavern, sit down, order an ale, and wait for some stranger in dire need of assistance to give us a map and promise great treasure and fame if we would help them, but Jen pointed out that I didn't really need another level in Geek, so the phat XP would be wasted.

grrrrr

Sorry about the lack of pictures in the last post. The internet connection here is a bit wonky and kept failing to upload the pictures. I tried again this morning, but to no avail. :(

UPDATE: I found another way to upload the pictures, so the previous post is now full of photographic goodness.

Dunedin to Queenstown

You will have to excuse our lack of blogging ... the last several days have been quite full of adventure, excitement, and driving. Also I forgot to pack an Ethernet cable and the B&B at which we were staying at Te Anau only has wired internet access.

On Friday, we did the Otago peninsula, just to the East of Dunedin. The driving was moderately terrifying, as the Kiwis apparently do not believe in guard rails. Our first stop was Larnach Castle. We were as surprised as you to learn that there is a castle in New Zealand.

The castle and its ground were gorgeous, but the sordid tale of the Larnach family was like a train wreck: you really want to look away, but have to keep finding out more. To sum up: Larnach had five children by his first wife. His first wife died suddenly, so Larnach married her sister with some sort of fancy prenuptial agreement to protect him from his creditors. His second wife died in surgery and there was some shenanigans with him forcing his children to sign an agreement without knowing what it contained to get all of his holdings back. He married a third wife: a sweet, young thing about 30 years his junior. Everything was super until one of his sons started having an affair with her. That ended with Larnach shooting himself in the Parliament building (he was a politician) and later the son killing himself as well. Soap opera writers could not make that sort if thing up.

After a perilous drive back down the mountain, we continued up the coast towards the wharf from which we were to depart for our albatross and seal viewing cruise. The cruise was pretty cool: we happened upon a port bound fishing boat which was trailed by a couple hundred sea birds, amongst which were Royal Northern, Royal Southern, and two other species of albatross. The guy driving the ship said that this was a very rare occurrence, as albatrosses do not normally follow shipping vessels that close to shore. In addition to the albatrosses, we also saw myriad other species of sea bird and New Zealand Fur Seals.



To cap off the afternoon, we went further up the coast to the Royal Albatross Centre, where we got to see four of the twenty-three chicks currently nesting on the Otago peninsula. A Royal Albatross chick will, at its heaviest, weigh in at 12-14 kilograms! That is 26-31 pounds for those of you, like me, who can't convert metric to American units in your head.

The drive back to Dunedin was not quite as nerve wracking as the drive out, as the west-bound lane was against the cliff face, instead of on the water side (with no guard rail and a shoulder whose width is best measured in millimeters), but it was still arduous. We had dinner at a hip little place called Craft, where I had lamb shank and Jen had a bowl of kumara pumpkin soup as big as her head (kumara is what they call a sweet potato here). We were greeted by a lovely little NZ$10 parking ticket when we got back to the car.

On Saturday, we had to drive up to Te Anau. Since it was not that far of a drive and we had all day, we decided to take the scenic southern route, rather than the more direct (and apparently not as scenic) route. Things were fairly slow going, due to all of the sharp, steep turns that driving through the mountains entails.

And then we saw the sign: Cannibal Bay, 400 m Turn Left. Jen and I experienced one of those moments of near-telepathic nonverbal communication that can only exist between two people who have been married as long as we have been (5 days, at that point), and we immediately turned off and drove 14 km over an unsealed (unpaved to you Yanks) road to a little beach with all sorts of cool rocks, cliffs, sea lions, and tourists attempting to be eaten by the sea lions. I'll let the pictures speak for them selves:





After scampering over rocks and around sea lions for longer than we should have we headed back to the car and realized that we might or might not be able to make it to Te Anau for the glow worm cruise that was scheduled for that evening. Contributing to the delay was the dinner we had in Invercargill at a place called Hell, which serves gourmet pizzas and had old Tom and Jerry cartoons playing on the plasma a screen. We managed to make it with minutes to spare, but only by leaving local speed ordinances crying and bleeding in the corner. Despite the name, the glow worm cruise was really cool. We took a boat across Lake Te Anau to the cave entrance, where they have built a wee lodge with refreshments and such for people taking the glow worm tour.

In the lodge at the entrance to the cave, they showed us a couple of time-lapse, infrared videos of glow worms in action. One of them was of a territorial fight between two glow worms that started with one glow worm knocking the other off the ceiling of the cave and ended with the knocked off glow worm getting eaten by the other one after a valiant, but ultimately futile counter attack. Several of the senior citizens who made up the rest of the tour group where quite shocked to see the brutality of the life of a glow worm.

Once the videos were done, we walked a couple hundred meters into the cave. There, we hopped onto a small, 10 person boat, the guide turned off all of the lights and we went deeper into the cave on the water to view the glow worms. Now, when I say "we went deeper into the cave on the water", what I mean is that in the pitch black darkness (the glow worms did not emit enough light to actually see anything) the guide stood at the bow of the boat and pulled us through the cave along chains that had been set into the cave wall. Alas, we could not take pictures of the glow worms, so you'll just have to take our word for it that they were cool.

The whole thing took about 2.5 hours and, once again, had us checking into our B&B after 10:30. This place was decorated in a fashion that I can only describe as ultramodern. Jen and I both felt like we were not cool enough to stay there. But, we had already booked it and they didn't have any other guests, so we stayed.



On Sunday, we had a free day in Te Anau. Having slept past all of the interesting cruises and tours departing from places near Te Anau, we decided to drive up to Milford Sound and do some short hikes and see a fiord. That is not a typo, apparently only the Scandinavians spell it fjord. We did six little side hikes, each 20-40 minutes in length: Lake Mistletoe, Walker Creek, Lake Gunn, Lake Marian Falls, and The Chasm. All of these were incredible in their own way. The best, however, were The Chasm (where a river has carved the rock into huge, intricate, swirling shapes that go down about 15 meters) and Lake Gunn (which was a walk through a beech tree forest that predated European knowledge of the Americas).



After the last side hike, we hoofed it up to Milford, where we hoped to catch a quick dinner and then try to head back to Te Anau before the sun went down. We missed the cafe closing by mere minutes and the bar did not start serving food for another half hour, so Jen had great fun taking pictures of the fiord until the batteries in the camera died. For dinner, Jen had a steak sandwich that was served with an enormous pile of beer-battered fries and I had pork sirloin garnished with fried apple and a beer-honey sauce that I am going to try to make once I get access to a kitchen again (I even went and asked the chef how it was made).



The drive back was uneventful once we got out of the clouds, except that the traffic signal at the kilometer long tunnel turns off at 6, so we had an interesting time navigating around oncoming traffic in the 1.5 lane tunnel. We also pulled off the road and killed the car to look at the stars in the clear, moonless sky without any light pollution.

That sums it up for the last couple of days. We are in Queenstown now, getting ready to head out for the evening. I'll tell you about our adventures this morning with a bloke named Fraser and Jen's first experience with left-side driving tomorrow.

Penguins and Cheese

Today we traveled on highway 1 about 5ish hours from Christchurch to Dunedin with a significant stop in Oamaru.

Scott was doing extremely well driving until today (as predicted by the customs agent, the 3rd day), and we had our first (hopefully only) accident. Now don't worry! The very minor accident involved Scott hitting a curb. The hubcap is really beat up and the tire appears to have a gash in it, but we took it to a tire place and they assured us that it was perfectly fine to drive on, so on we go.

In a town called St. Andrews we felt the Pacific Ocean of the NZ coast for the first time.

We made it to Oamaru by 12noon for our special behind the scenes tour of the Oamaru Little Blue Penguin Colony, which actually turned out to be not all that special because all of the nesting boxes that we got to have a sneak peek into were all empty today. The tour lady was very nice though and it was just the three of us for the tour, so we got extra attention...OK all the attention. She also allowed our half-hour tour to stretch into an hour of Q and A. Next we were told that the actual penguin viewing that we were entitled to wasn't until 6pm, bummer. Fortunately, there was a local cheese factory, Whitestone, that had a cafe and a viewing area and another Penguin colony that we could visit to pass the time.

At the Whitestone Cafe we of course got the cheese sampling and had some really awesome cheeses, including a Windsor Blue cheese that has won all kinds of awards. We also got to go into a viewing area that looks into the factory where people were making the cheese. It was cool and the workers even hammed it up a bit for us by pretending to eat the cheese, etc.

Next we went to the Yellow-Eyed Penguin Colony. This was little more than a cliffside path with a "hide" overlooking a stretch of shoreline about 1/2 mile long. The YEP is endangered and really shy, so they try to have a lot less human contact with this species. We sat, stood, waited, and watched from about 3pm until 5:20pm and after several people had left in frustration, we were rewarded for our patience when 2 YEP's swam ashore for our viewing pleasure. Since there are only about 450 breeding pairs in this part of NZ and it is the off (molting) season for them, we were really lucky to have seen them.

Then it was back to the LBP Colony to see the 6pm viewing which had us sitting in bleachers and watching as the penguins came up a ramp from the sea and charged across an open area of gravel, and through a wire fence into the protected colony area with their nesting boxes. They are very cheeky little penguins, and were absolutely hilarious and fascinating to watch. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take any pictures. :( We left around 8pm after 46 penguins had come out of the sea to nest for the night.

We then took off for Dunedin and stopped in Moeraki for dinner. We first went to THE TAVERN, but they were no longer serving food, so we were directed to THE RESTAURANT (Fleur's Place). If you couldn't tell, Moeraki is kind of a tiny fishing village. Anyway, the restaurant turned out to be a very excellent, gourmet fish restaurant (go figure) dripping with character. I had some flat fish that starts with a T, and Scott had Grouper. Both were incredible.
It is very dark in this part of NZ at night, but we finally made it to the lights of Dunedin and our B&B, The Claremont House, around 10:30pm. We are in the yellow room. It is cool.

I will post some pictures from today tomorrow, but for now I am dead tired and off to beddy bye. Scott's already asleep. ;)

Post Nuptials

Hey, everyone, it is me, Jen, so expect future entries to be less witty. They will also be shorter and less frequent since tomorrow a.m. we leave the conveniences of the city and may not have regular internet access. Plus, we are doing a lot of scheduled activities which may leave us a bit short on "blog-time".

Since we last posted, we spent most of Tuesday sleeping and recovering, but also went to the International Antarctic Center where we saw handicapped Little Blue Penguins and got to ride around in a Haggland (an all-terrain, amphibian Antarctic vehicle) driven by a crazy man named Shaun. We had dinner at a neat place called the Tap Room where Scott had green-lipped mussels and really good Monteith's beer, and I had kangaroo and a Kiwi daiquiri. We walked around a lot after that looking for the Christchurch casino which sadly had no poker on Tuesdays. I still walked away $5.00NZ richer though from some boring slots.

Wednesday: We went on an all day tour to where they filmed Edoras, Rohan for the Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers. Now, I know that most of you are now scratching your heads a bit because I told you all that that was where we were getting married. I lied. Or rather, I was under some false presumptions. Anyway, it matters not at all. Point is, we went there.

As I said, we leave tomorrow for Dunedin, which is south of Christchurch along the east coast of NZ. On the way, we will stop at Omauru to see some normal Little Blue Penguins on a behind the scenes tour.

Here are some more wedding pictures and some pictures from the last 2 days.

At Edoras:




At the International Antarctic Center:


In Christchurch:
More wedding photos:

We Done Got Hitched!

The day started when the air-raid siren that is our room alarm clock went off at 0500 stopping both Jen and my hearts. After a quick use of the defibrillator, Jen started getting ready and I went back to sleep.

We had breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Jen had French toast and I had the Warners Classic Grill. The Kiwi interpretation of French Toast, by the way, involves piling Canadian bacon and fried bananas on top of the toast. An odd combo, but it sorta worked.

After breakfast, our wedding coordinator, Donna, and her crazy Japanese husband/business partner, Shoei, picked us up to go the the Office of Internal Affairs to get the legal bits out of the way. There, Donna annoyed the nice bureaucrat by committing heinous crimes against spelling on the wedding application. Jen and I had to swear that we were not related in any way (they had a list of several dozen relationships that were forbidden to marry). That done, we headed back to the hotel and Donna made Jen promise to eat (something that, apparently, many brides forget to do).

We had about an hour and a half before the hair and makeup person was going to show up, so we walked around Christchurch for a bit to run some errands and find a bite. We found a bite at a small cafe whose name is escaping both of us at the moment. We both had a "Toasty", which is a fancy way of saying "grilled sammich". Jen had mushrooms and ham, I had chicken and tomatoes. Jen's sarsasparilla beer was way better than my organic apple-black current juice.

The makeup person, Julie-Anne, showed up on time and I (Scott) was banished to the hotel lounge with a book.

Hours passed.

I returned to the room in time to catch the end of Jen's hair and makeup application and for both of us to start getting dressed. Everyone loved both of our costumes, especially Jen's dress. As we exited the hotel to get into the Rolls Royce that was taking us to the heliport, we got a lot of stares from a group of tourists who were boarding a bus right outside the hotel.

The helicopter ride took us to the wedding location: the confluence of the Waimakariri and Esk Rivers in the Southern Alps. It was very windy and we startled a rabbit upon landing. The helicopters landed on a ridge above the rocky riverbed. We hiked up about 100 yards into a field of wild grass and thorny berry bushes that loved Jen's dress and shawl.

And then there was some drama with Jen's belt, the ceremony, some coffee mugs, an exchange of rings, some pictures, some bubbly, some paper work to sign, and we were off again back to the heliport.

The scenery both to and from the location was absolutely breathtaking.

After we returned, we quickly changed into our fancy, shmancy dinner clothes and went to a marvelous dinner at the Curator's House, which was highly recommended by the hotel staff, but not in any of the tour books (which we took to be a very good sign). When the concierge made the booking, apparently they let slip that we were newly weds, so we had a private room on the second floor with wee confetti spelling out "Congratulations" all over the table. I had a porterhouse steak with portabella mushrooms topped with some sort of salsa. Jen had cold marinated venison and a side order of olives. We split a divine Crema Catalana, which is a cinnamon and lemon flavored creme brulee.

And then we walked home and collapsed.

Here is an official wedding picture for your viewing enjoyment. We'll post some that we have taken once we buy a cord that will let us download the pictures from the camera, as I was stupid and did not pack it.

Christchurch

We are all checked in and settled into our hotel here in Christchurch. We are staying at the Warners Historic Hotel, which is some sort of historic hotel with internet access, but no central heat (each room has a wall-mounted heater unit). The rooms have old-school metal keys (as opposed to a key card) that are attached to a big chunk of wood (3" x 2"). While that does make it rather hard to loose the key, it is a little awkward to have in one's pocket. As honeymooners, the hotel upgraded our room on the house, which we thought was very kind of them.

We took a walk earlier in the day, looking for a place to have lunch. It turns out, however, that almost all of the restaurants in Christchurch are closed for lunch on Sunday. Bah. We ended up eating in the hotel restaurant. Jen had a lamb salad, I had bruschetta.

The walk was fruitful, however, in that we got to experience a kiwi cuckoo clock chiming the hour. It was an enormous egg-shaped clock with a kiwi sitting on top. When it was time to do its thing, the side of the egg opened up and there were several scenes played out about different phases of New Zealand history. Without a narrator, it was more or less nonsensical. There was a bit with a sheep getting shorn and sporting a poodle show cut, something about rugby, a random bungee jumper, and it closed with an alien riding a hover bike. We really don't know what the last part was supposed to be, but I'll see if I can trade in the Toyota Carola that we are renting for one of those hover bikes.

We had dinner at the Tandori Palace, an Indian restaurant next door to the hotel. Jen had a basket of nan (the way tasty Indian flat bread) as big as her head (I am, for once, not exaggerating when I use that idiom) and I had a chicken curry. All the food was excellent. Jen had a glass of the ginger beer, which was very good, and I had a local beer: the Monteiths Dark. I'm not quite sure where it falls in the beer taxonomy, perhaps a dark lager? Regardless, it gets two thumbs up: Smooth, complex flavor with a hint of spice and almost no aftertaste. The evening was made, however, by the Crazy Mongolian (complete with fur-lined hat) who peered into the window next to our table and started talking. We are not sure if he was trying to talk to us or was content to converse with the voices in his head.

Tomorrow is the big day. Jen is getting up at 5 to start prepping ... I will be getting up significantly later, as I am a guy and thus relatively low maintenance.

We made it!

We are in the Auckland airport, with about 2 hours to wait until our flight to Christchurch.

Estimated time to nuptuals: 33 hours

Crunch time!

Tonight begins the packing frenzy, which has been preceded by a laundry and cleaning frenzy the last couple of nights.

I'll have to remember to check the bags on Friday to make sure that we didn't pack one of the cats.

Slightly more than 50 hours until we get on a plane to LAX!