We hope you enjoy viewing them as much as we enjoyed taking them!

Still in New Zealand. We have travelled over 3,500 kilometers so far! We have also been driving on the left side of the road as they do here and our rental car is manual transmission….needless to say it takes brain power to drive here. 98% of the roads here are small, two lane, winding country roads…not mention the many mountain passes with no guardrails or shoulders and the hundreds of one lane bridges…..It’s an adventure!

Much of New Zealand is National Forests so there is just so much open land and space. Only 4.5 million people live here and 1million of them are in Auckland. All of New Zealand sits on many earthquake faults….naturally you’ve heard about the big one in February in ChristChurch but they actually have many smalls all the time. They used to call NZ the “shaky islands”…but they stopped because it was bad for tourism. NZ economy depends on tourism as well as sheep, cattle and hops. I’ll bet you did not know that NZ actually grows the largests perecentage of the world’s Hops…to make beer! (Fun Fact). Since the Christ Church earthquake and the recent Japan earthquake the airlines here have already taken a hit with tourism. NZ is a huge destination for Asian visitors. They will unfortunately be feeling the loss of tourism economy from Japan.

We were in Wellington, the capital of NZ a few weeks ago and experienced a fair earthquake at 10pm one night. We were in our hotel and the wind was gusting 120kts….I was brushing my teeth and Mike was looking out the window at the crazy wind when the whole building shook and you hear the loud rumble that goes with it. I came out of the loo and said….”what was that?” We found out later it was a 4.5 quake but deep in the ground at 40km. They are quite used to quakes in Windy Wellington so it was no big deal to them. I’m glad to be out of there for now. There were actually 40 earthquakes reported in one day in NZ on March 20th…a bit more than usual so it’s weird. I personally think that once one fault moves it only makes sense that others have to move to compensate…we’ll shall see.

It was summer when we arrived in NZ in Feb. but now is Autumn. The weather has been a bit colder than last year for sure. The west coast of the south island is known for being colder and rainy and it has not disappointed….still beautiful though. We’ve been camping but have graduated to a cabin with heat the last few days due to the cold!!

We’ve been having fun and I will write more about our adventures today…..Life is Good!