Another Day in New Zealand: Whiting Christmas: Part 1

Back from Rarotonga and time to start catching up with some serious blogging. Cole has been putting me to shame! With only a few months to go before we are coming home it is time to get some posts done. It is winter here, and I got a picture of our first "snow" a few weeks ago. Was more like a giant sleet storm, everything was wet but it only lasted a few days.

I got this picture as the sun was coming up from the house before I went to work.

All the cold weather has put us in the Christmas spirit even though it is the middle of June. We are seriously considering putting the Christmas tree back up again in protest. And as Cole informed me today, it is half-Christmas today! What a great opportunity to show you what Rebecca and I did for Christmas.

We went on a huge week long road trip to tour the south island. It was our first opportunity to take a whole week off of work, so it has still been our only opportunity to make it to the north tip of the south island. As you can see though it was a lot of time in the car. It was worth it though because we saw some amazing sites. I knew it was a long trip, but making this map just now, was it really 27 hours! Wow...

First stop was Taieri Mouth. It's a tiny little fishing community on the east coast. On the way to Dunedin if you take the scenic route by the ocean you run into this little town. You can see all the boats and little fishing shacks at the wharf.

Tiny Taieri Island was just off the coast. Beach lined ocean. It almost looked like you could walk out to the island at low tide (but I'm pretty sure you can't).

Rebecca and I trying to master the selfie...

We went down the road a little bit and and found a place to park the car. There was a small trail through the trees that popped out on the beach. Wild yellow flowers led the way.

A beautiful blue sky day, perfect sand. Still too far south though to enjoy the beach, kind of windy and chilly still.

We had left our first night after work, so we only made it 3-4 hours down the road before spending the night at Oamaru. The next morning we got up and continued our trip. We only made it a few miles down the road to the Waitaki River before traffic came to a stand still. We couldn't see what was going on but they were pulling us all off the road. The truck in front of us had three dogs, the one on the right seemed to have a better view than us and was very interested....

Oh... house...

Only took a few minutes and we were back on the road...

We were going to drive the coast up, but we found an inland scenic drive we hadn't been on before, so drove this in to the Rakaia Gorge. Stopped to take a picture of the water. More milky blue water from glacier melt off the great Southern Alps.

After we drove through the gorge, the road went up, up, up... From the other side we looked back up the valley. Lots of evergreen trees tucked in everywhere...

The Rakaia River braided down over the horizon over its rocky bed.

We had to drive the rest of the day, but we made it to Hanmer Springs. Conical Hill, a popular nearby peak looms over the little city. You can hike up there but we were burnt from the long day on the road.

Lucky for us though we had stumbled upon Hanmer Springs annual Christmas parade! We hadn't planned it or anything, right place right time! Looks like throwing candy in the parade is an international tradition...

Looks like they dressed up some holiday llamas. They looked pretty content, their elves don't look so happy though...

Nothing says manly truck like a good bubble machine...

Nice little hot rod... He could probably use a little more leg room though...

Hippie invasion! They painted a nice little Kiwi on the bottom of the van... I think Santa is driving the van, and that's a chimney up there... Lots going on here...