My Pretty Amazing Day...

I thought Janwyn's post regarding her favorite day, last Wednesday, was a good idea. I'm going to go ahead and steal it.

Thus far on the trip, this past Friday had to be my favorite. Why? Well I'll tell ya...

We had a few hours to hang out in Dunedin before our Cadbury World factory tour, so we opted for a beach walk which our guidebook recommended. Unfortunately, it didn't tell us precisely how to get there, so we ended up hopelessly lost in a suburb called St. Kildes (sp?) near a beach. It didn't look good for the home team!

But, I took another look at the map, thought it was worth a try and drove off, staying on the left side of the road of course. And we're glad we did, because we found the beach, called Tunnels, about 15 minutes from where we were. It was a 30 minute hike to the shore, but there we found natural, wave-carved tunnels as well as a man-made tunnel, dug through sandstone down to a private beach. How great!

A note to my Dad- Hey Dad, do you remember seeing that posting on a road trip we took once that said, "Once the wind stopped blowing in Nebraska, and everyone fell over?" Dunedin, and the entire South of the South Island for that matter, it exactly the same way. Needless to say, going Uphill against the wind from the beach was not as fun as going Downhill with the wind to the beach. Oh well, we made it.

Than it was off to Cadbury World where we were plied with plenty of free samples and learned all about what makes Cadbury the best chocolate maker. Of course, Janwyn and I being Americans, when asked what our favorite Cadbury product was, just had blank stares. Uh, Snickers? (wrong) Kit-Kat? (wrong) M&M's? (really, really wrong!). A correct answer is Morro Bar or Perfect Nana for future reference! (We'd never heard of either of those).

And a note for everyone at home ... when we're uncovered as Americans, as we were on this tour, the strong majority of foreign nationals want to express they're vast excitement for our in-coming president. They are SOOOOOO excited, they can hardly contain themselves and wish to share their joy with us. So I'm passing it on to you. Enjoy.

And back to the story, after being filled with chocolate and then a quick dinner, we headed to a nearby glowworm grotto, a stream-carved valley where the same glowworms made famous at the Waitomo caves in the North Island light up at night. It was a similar cool experience as the North Island, without the cliff-jumping or cool head gear.

And the icing on the cake was possibly the best geocache we've ever done! (are you listening Grandpa Jack?). On the trail back from the glowworms, someone had set up a geocache where you tracked small, reflective triangles through the bush (American: Forest) for 500 metres (American: 1/4 mile) to the final cache. It was a really great way to tie geocaching in with the glowworms we just saw. We both felt lucky that was our first NZ geocache for this trip!

All-in-all, it was a pretty impressive day. I hope for similar days to come!