Time to move on.  Two hours after leaving Christchurch, the tour company called our driver and told him he had to pick up people up from the airport.  So now we are behind schedule four hours which makes for a long day of driving.  He dropped us off in a small town and we just wandered around for a couple hours while he went back to Christchurch.  I don’t like this part of the tour.  Just when you get to know people and bond with them, they leave and new people come on.  Maybe my future husband will be one of the new people. It was a full day of driving to the tiny town of Franz Joseph.  The drive was so beautiful.  There were so many waterfalls that we started playing a game to see who could call out the new ones fastest.  All along the trip whenever we are near the ocean, people have been telling us we might see an orca and of course no one has seen an orca.  So, we decided if you see a waterfall, just call out Orca.  I can’t even count how many orcas we saw.   My future husband is not in the group of new people.  After dinner they had dance music and the younger Italian guy likes dancing.  He pulled out some dance moves I can’t begin to explain.  It was like gumby crossed with Saturday Night Fever, some chicken dance and a dash of the Rockettes.  It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.  The older Italian wanted to play cards so I tried to teach him Rummy.  It was very difficult to teach so I left out some of the harder rules and let a lot of wrong moves, like playing out of turn, slide – Rummy Lite.  All was going ok until he decided he didn’t like the game anymore and proceeded to try to teach me a game.  It looked kind of like Rummy, but with more cards.  No matter what I did, it was wrong and he’d get upset because I wasn’t playing right.  He’d then tell me what I was doing wrong.  Unfortunately, no matter how many times he’d tell me, I still don’t speak Italian.  So, he’d tell me again and I still hadn’t learned Italian.

The next day 8 of us went on a glacier hike on the Franz Joseph Glacier.  Because the glacier has receded so much in the past few years you can no longer hike to the glacier.  You now have to be taken by helicopter.  This made the hike very expensive, but also makes you feel like a bad-ass.  For those of you who don’t know, I am in love with snow.  Ice is equally as wonderful.  I would have been happy to spend a week up there.  It’s so beautiful.  In 3 hours, I took 320 photos.  I won’t post them all, but I will probably post more photos than you want to see.  Sorry.  Sort of.  No, not really.  After the glacier, spent some time in the hot springs, then all you can eat pizza.  Good day.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore