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: