On our way home, we are getting the evening flight from Auckland and should be back in San Francisco earlier today !! Looking forward to seeing everyone again - girls are homesick! Hopefully they will fall asleep and wake up in USA but then another Saturday to travel back to Baltimore. As Lilly said if we have to have a day twice couldn't we do something more fun than traveling......

Woke up to another sunny day, cloud still on the tops of the mountain but there is hope.... (Many people have warned me that you don't get to see the top of mt cook very often which is why it's Maori name means 'cloud piercer'. We took a boat tour on lake Tasman the glacial lake formed at the front of the Tasman glacier, NZ largest. The boat hit an iceberg floating in the lake but no damage done and the girls got to eat some 300 year old ice! The tour was very ...

After all the rain ( thank goodness we weren't in the west where bridges were being washed away and roads closed) we woke up to a beautiful sunny day and discovered what a lovely town Oamaru was. Lilly, Ellie and I walked into town through the beautiful public gardens which left me wondering how NZ affords all these beautiful public spaces ? to get to one of the coolest playgrounds ever. It had a huge pipe that turned out to be a kid hamster wheel that 4 or 5 ...

Another exciting part of Dunedin was getting to visit a real chocolate factory - Cadbury, although unluckily it was a holiday and the productions lines were closed. However we did get to sample Lots of chocolate including NZ specialities like Jaffas and see a real chocolate fountain. Then traveling north up the coast we stopped at a beach to see the really cool boulders shown in the picture and camp at Omaru. Our very first rainy afternoon gave the girls a chance...

Bye Queenstown....off on the long drive to Dunedin. The town itself seems a bit dead after Queenstown- off course it does have Scottish origins and it is New Years Day - even jan 2nd is a holiday here. Finally the big event the girls have waited for - seeing penguins - we got really close to yellow eyed penguins on a nature tour of the peninsular, walking up the path we were taking to the beach. Then from the hide we saw chicks being fed by their parent and le...