Date:  Monday, May 7, 2007

Location:  Fox Glacier, New Zealand

We are here on the west coast of the south island of New Zealand at Fox Glacier this morning.  Fox Glacier is a small town of maybe 1,000 people on the west side of the Southern Alps and Mt. Cook and Tasman.  The town’s existence is mainly to support tourism and is on highway 6, the main and only highway down the west coast through this area.  The town is named after the Fox Glacier which is nearby.

 

There are numerous outdoor activities including guided glacier hiking (with crampons, ice picks, etc.), helicopter rides and tours of Mt. Cook with snow landings, etc.  Wayland was planning on taking the helicopter ride again this year with the glacier hike as a second choice depending on the weather.  However, it has been raining most of the night and continues this morning so it looks like neither option will probably happen today.

 

So far the trip has been a mixture of unusual and strange happenings.  It all started at the airport in Los Angeles.  Just as we were checking in the Air New Zealand computers went down in Auckland that are used to check in people for flights.  About half of the plane had been loaded and all but three of our team had been checked in.  This caused an hour and half delay leaving LAX.  Next, on the flight one of the single ladies on our team had a bad reaction to a prescribed sleeping pill she had taken to help sleep on the flight.  As a result after one night in Christchurch she decided to return to the United States and we helped with the return arrangements and she flew out the next day.

 

We arrived late in Auckland and missed the flight down to Christchurch and the next flight that we could get seats on was at noon but it was late also and we didn’t arrive in Christchurch until about 2PM.  We were supposed to get in about 8AM so this caused a few problems with doing the paperwork and renting of the motorhomes.  It turned into a rather long day fraught with numerous phone calls, schedule changes, etc.

 

After arriving on May 1st and making it to the next day we headed down the east coast to Geraldine where the goodies at the Berry Barn were just as good as always.  There we all headed over to the east side of Mt. Cook where we stayed at a campground very close to the mountain along beautiful Lake Pukaki.

 

The next morning, before our morning devotions, one of the husbands announced that his wife had slipped in the camper and broken her ankle.  We all felt so bad for her but was an issue to deal with.  They are a very self-sufficient couple with a lot of travel to overseas places and they dug in and basically handled everything themselves.  X-rays at the clinic in Twizel showed that the ankle was broken and the recommendation was to have a pin and plate put in down in Invercargill.  We packed up and headed down to TeAnau.

 

After spending a beautiful day on the Milford Sound day cruise, the broken ankle couple left the group Saturday morning and headed down to Invercargill hoping that the procedure could be completed sometime Saturday or Sunday.  As it turned out the X-ray technicians were on a strike over the weekend.  Today is Monday and procedure has been completed.  She will have to stay in Invercargill for a day or two before the cast can be put on but they look forward to rejoining the rest of the team at some point in the future.

 

Sunday we drove up to Queenstown from TeAnau and it turned out to be a beautiful day.  We rode the gondola up on the mountain overlooking Queenstown and had dinner in the mountain side restaurant.  The sky was clear and the view was spectacular.  We celebrated one of the team members birthday at the restaurant.  It was a good day.

 

Sunday we drove over to Fox Glacier on the west coast.  Four, including myself, took the half day glacier hike.  After two hours of strenuous hiking through rainforest we came out on the glacier and after donning crampons proceeded to hike out on the ice.  I never realized there could be such a huge chunk of ice.  It was a very interesting hike and we got back to the campground around 1:30PM.  After a quick lunch of a panini sandwich in the little town of Fox Glacier we headed northeast for Greymouth.

 

The crossing of Haast Pass and the drive on down to the Tasman was uneventful.  We got into rain and when we stopped at Haast Beach it was really wet and the Tasman Sea was breaking large waves so there must have been a storm further out at sea.

 

Have to pack up here at Greymouth to get moving again.  Will have to save the lost child story (another strange happening) for a later time.