Circling the South Island with My Parents

Well, somehow we all survived it. My parents have been visiting us for the past two weeks and we took them for a whirlwind tour of the South Island. A few times along the way I was not entirely sure how we would all survive the trip, but by the end we had found a balance and gotten into a steady traveling rhythm.

Since our Australia map has had an astonishing 230 views I thought I would make a new map to show this journey. All told we put an additional two thousand kilometer on the car and I took 1398 pictures. I think there were at least a hundred times that my parents collectively said "Wow!" at the incredible scenery we saw along the way.

For instance, they were both excited to get rather close to the Fox Glacier (it is impossible to capture with a picture just how big it really is).


Here they are on the way back from a rather long hike we took them on up the Pororira River valley.



Marveling at Mt. Cook:


We even got my Mother to cross a foot bridge that swung fifty feet above the churning melt-water coming from Mueller Glacier.


Occasionally we found ourselves out walking on beaches:


Or tasting a wee bit of wine outside of Queenstown:


Or just wandering through fields of flowers:


Hope everyone has been having a good start to the new year.

My parents made me promise to try and go through all of our pictures and get them uploaded to our website. I just went through and counted, and actually there are fewer than I had feared: 3841 from Australia and 3728 from New Zealand. I was sure I had broken the 10K barrier by now.

So sometime in the near future I'll try and cut that down to just the good ones. Somehow I don't think anyone wants to wade through all 424 pictures we took on our whale watch in Australia.