Well, having to use the internet in an internet cafe is getting expensive and is the reason for lack of blogging. We are now in Christchurch, but spent a couple of wonderful days in Kaikoura....

We stayed in a cute little hostel called The Albatross Inn. In our room there was a sign that said, "Do not be alarmed if a siren goes off in the middle of the night. It is to alert the firefighters if there is a fire since their pages don't seem to work. The siren is not an alert for a tsunami, air raid, hurricane or any other disaster you should be worried about." At this point I can only assume this is a volunteer fire department. And although I appreciate those who volunteer to risk their lives for other people, I do have a little bit of a problem with the fact they feel it is important to wake up the whole town to let them know what is going on instead of using their pagers. How they can even make a siren that is loud enough to wake the whole town is beyond me. Maybe they should use that knowledge to make the pagers volume turn up higher. Luckily, this only happened one night out of the three we were there. And believe me ... it works. I was ready to get up and fight a fire just so the stupid thing would go off and I could go back to sleep! As some of you are reading this you are probably a little worried for our safety. I know what you are thinking... "if that is only used to alert firefighters, then how are you supposed to know if there really was a disaster?". Don't worry, the sign covered that too. They said a man in a van would drive around and scream if something was to come up. I appreciate that the people of Kaikoura have learned from history and thought Paul Revere was on the right track. Although I had no idea they cared that much about American History. My only concern is that the man that is supposed to drive around in the van to warn us is also one of the volunteer firefighters.

One of the cool things about New Zealand is that you can be standing on the beach and be only about an hour from snow mountains. One day we drove up to Mt. Lyford and went snowboarding, which for me personally was the best day of snowboarding I have ever had. It was a weekday so there were probably only about 50 people on the mountain including employees. Drew and I even hit some jumps. Not in the way Shawn White or Zach Standefer hits jumps, but at least we attempted them.

Other then that we went to a wine tasting and saw tons of seals! Not at the same time though. There really were tons of seals, not just the wine making it look like that. As soon as we can get on Drew's computer we will post some pictures. And for all of you that are wondering what the heck that picture bellow is about.... Gollum people. New Zealand + Lord of the Rings.... come on.