Day 20 - Heading home

On our way to the airport, we stopped to watch a cricket match.

I dont get this game at all. 

We slept in until 8:15am.  This was the latest we slept the whole trip because we always were so excited to get out the door explore.  We headed out to check out the beach and went for a walk along it. Watched the surfers and swimmers it was in the high 70s but windy.  On the way, we stopped for my final savory scone and flat white.
Ironically, when we were on our way to return our rental car Matt turned onto the wrong side of the road for the first time of the entire trip.  It was a little scary as there was a car coming but he recovered well.  Our rental car return gave us more reasons to love this place.  They found some scratches on the front bumper.  We honestly hadn't looked the car over when we picked it up and had know idea how we would have gotten scratches on it.  The worker said she had to show her manager.  I'm thinking, oh great, they'll look and see that we didn't get the extra insurance and make a big hassle out of this.  The manager came out, looked at the scratches and said oh we can buff those out.  No worries, Mate.  That so would not have gone down like that at an American rental car place.  I heart NZ.
Our flight back took us to Auckland and then onto San Fran.  The flight was way more crowded than on the way there but it was 3 days before Christmas so that made sense.  The landing in San Fran caused Matt to declare we will never fly in to that airport again (I'll just say that many folks utilized their air sickness bags so it was pretty bad).  We had a bit of a layover and then headed back to Portland where it was dark, cloudy and rainy at 4:30pm.  Home sweet home:-)  Next time I'll post some funny new zealand-isms we learned and my final thoughts on the trip.

Day 19 - Mt Cook and Christchurch

The clouds had settled in overnight and we woke up not even able to see the mountains.  We decided to head up to the Mt Cook visitors center and check it out.  It was basically a museum about the area and mountain climbing.  Pretty cool.  It began pouring rain and we were thankful that our timing had worked out with our hike the day before.  After a couple of hours of checking out the visitors center, headed to Christchurch where we would fly out the following day.

This was the only picture we took on this day.  I wore 0 make-up our entire trip.  Loved it!

We stopped at Hagley Park and Botanic Gardens in  Christchurch.  It was beautiful but several of the buildings were closed due to the earthquake that happened in February of 2011.  When we tried to go to dinner that evening most of the central downtown was still closed and just fenced off so we kept running into dead ends.  That struck me as very different from the US.  Here, we would likely be working on getting things back to normal as quickly as possible but NZ has some kind of governmental review process that could mean 10 years before things are restored to the way they were.  It was odd to run into fenced off roads and piles of rubble on a corner that represented what was left of a demolished building.  A little eerie.   We ended up at an Italian Restaurant called Tutto Benne.  Delicious last meal in NZ.
The holiday park we stayed at proved to be my least favorite.  There were some men a few doors down that hung out on their patio all evening drinking and getting loud but I figured out of all the places we stayed, having 1 bad experience wasn't not so bad.  We didnt' want to sleep really anyway because we knew when we woke up it would be our final day in this great place.

Day 18 - Mt Cook, Mueller Hut Track

We woke up to a perfectly clear day and started out.  The first hour of the hike was stairs which went straight up.  After that the hike turned to scrambling over boulders and then we started crossing snowfields.  We could hear avalanches off Mt Sufton in the distance.  We got to the top of the ridge and then climbed another 20 minutes thru snow and builders to Mueller Hut.

View from Sealy Tarns (the halfway point).  Honestly, I was ready to quit after  climbing 100s of stairs but the views were awesome.

See the red hut near the top of the snowfield?

Mt Cook

I chilled at the hut and took in the view.

Matt decided to do the hike up to Mt. Olivier which was right behind the hut and the first mountain Sir Edmund Hilary ever climbed.  He got to glisade down.

View from Mt. Olivier

Every angle was beautiful here.

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not our finest self portrait

This was my favorite part of the whole trip.  After a long, challenging hike we glisaded down the snowfield.  It was pretty steep so you go going pretty fast and there was a cloud of snow that flew up after you.

We had so much fun that we hiked up the snowfield and did it again!

Sucha a great day and still plenty of sunlight, after we finished the Mueller Hut Track, we headed over to Kea Point.  It was a short hike out to a view point of the glacier.

Back at camp we were darn tired.  Thankfully we got a room for our 2nd night so we packed up our tent and moved over to our room.  After we made dinner and cleaned up, we chatted with the man next door for awhile.  He was british but currently living in Australia and in NZ on holiday.  He was a riot and once again we realized that the rest of the world cares way more about US politics than we do.