Hi everyone :-) It's Henrys birthday today! yey however the weather isn't to special. We were planning to go for a ski today for his birthday but it is so wet and miserable. We treated ourselves to a nice lunch though which was good. So we never got to do our sky dive either :-( the weather has been to wet and windy. So we visited a vineyard at lake wanaka and then dicided to move on up the west coast passing through the Gates of Hasst which were amazing (it's where two river meet and the rapids are fierce!). The drive was really cool, because of the rain there were loads of huge waterfalls and even small one at the side on the road. We then has our first NZ roast lamb at Hasst which was beautiful! It was so good to have some vegetables. We then found a friendly motorcamp to stay the night. The next day we headed up to fox, where there is a huge glacier, called the Fox glacier. Its really is amazing, hard to describe really. The glacier is made of blue ice but it is in a stage of retreating so its literally melting and huge chunks of ice falling off before your eyes. There are streams of glacial water pouring out. We wern't supposed to go near it before of falling ice but we hopped the fence lol to get a closer look and its really breathtaking. What was really astouding was seeing where the glacier was only a few years ago. We also visited Gillespies beach whcih had black sand and rough seas! Also a few wild sheep on the way. So within one place there was the ocean, beach, rain forests and a massive glacier. We the moved on to Franzs Josef which has an even bigger glacier! lol Again it was pretty amazing and for some reason this glacier is advancing (around 1m a day). That evening we stayed at a nice DOC (department of conservation) by a river and made a campfire :-) The next day we moved on to Greymouth which is a larger town on the west coast, we past through Hokitika but it turned out to be a bit of a ghost town, Hen has some dodgy macoroni! We only stayed there one night as we heard from a guy at Milford sound about a really cool knifemaking activity in a small town called Barrytown. So we headed to Barrytown where is cool old man teaches you to make a knife out of red hot steel! It took all day but the outcome was so cool. You get to design the shape of you knife and everything. The handle is made out or rata a nz tree. We got to use all the tool (dad you would have loved it). I was proud of my jigsaw action. They gave us lunch and tea and coffee and let us meet the miniture horses! They were so cute. They had loads of animals wondering around the place. After the knifes were finished and polished the gave us some barrypagne (champagne from barrytown!) so in turn Hen gave him some of him whiskey, (although he already had a whickey hangover from the day before!) lol. It was such a good day and so we have 2 huge knifes with us, hurray. The next day we drove to Hamner but didn;t really do much as we were preparing to ski today but due to weather we drove to Kaikoura (meaning rock lobster) this morning. We are hoping to go whale watching here as they have sperm whales, but also they have the rare hectors dolphins, dusky dolphins, and seals. So bye for now, Hens says "thanks Jane and gary for the happy birthday song this morning, it was a nice alarm!) lots of love abbey and henry xxxxxxxxxxxxx