The week leading up to leaving was kind of ridiculous. I got sick the Wednesday before we left, with the flu, and that continued for about a week, and I only started feeling better a couple of days before the wedding. I kept working right up to the Friday, and we packed the car Friday night, to catch the Ferry first thing on Saturday morning.
We had to ensure we had everything we needed, and ensure we were in time to catch the ferry. Craig was amazing here, and single handedly packed the car… There was literally enough room for us to sit, and not much else.
The ferry crossing was lovely and smooth, and we found some long couches to sit on, where we both stretched out and slept pretty much the whole trip
The first part of our trip was quite nice, through Blenheim, then down to Kaikoura, with a stop at the waterfall of the seal babies! They were super cute, leaping and jumping and fighting. Unfortunately I didn’t get any good photos, as it is quite dark near the waterfall.
Lunch in Kaikoura was delishuz, pies and apple things, with my first ever vege Potato Top Pie.
We kept right on driving to Tekapo that night, with a brief stop for a wallaby. We stayed the night in a nice little backpackers, then woke the Sunday to a lovely crisp day. We drove around to the little church, taking photos, and then had a conversation with Holly T (our photographer).
After pictures at the lake, we continued on to take pictures of Mt Cook, but there was a lot of low cloud. We drove up the road to Mt Cook, and we moved out of the cloud, into brilliant sun and snowy mountains. I had never been up there (that I remember), so it was great to look around. I never realised you could get so close to Mt Cook. We had a brief walk around the village. The view was exceptionally pretty. We drove up the road to the valley with the Tasman Glacier, where we walked up to the lookout. It was very exciting, with rocks everywhere, the glacier in the distance, and icebergs floating on the lake.
A quick stop at the salmon farm, to pick up some fresh salmon, then we kept right on driving to Alexandra. We bought a couple of whole salmon, and the asian tourists who were there were very excited about this, and kept asking how much they weighed, and what we were going to cook. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pics of the salmon, so here are some ducks instead! They are NZ Scaup, little black ducks, and they swam around at the salmon farm, making cute little noises.
Dale and Becca 