This is the best birthday ever.I woke up, and while the Jens and Lauren went out to check out the neighborhood and Leah slept in a bit, I settled in with some breakfast and some tea, painted my nails, and set about figuring out how the TV works. As it turns out, we have Sky TV, which is a dish service, and we have all the channels. Ahh. This is, as one of my friends pointed out when I returned home, "a perfect Erin King day."
It only got better when we went to check out Cathedral Cove. It required some doing to get there (a
40-minute walk, both uphill and downhill) but it was worth it. I don't think we all realized what it was going to be but it was awesome once we were there. There was even a couple having their wedding photos there -- which made me think later on, "um, was there a shortcut that we could have taken?" Because if that girl traipsed down the same way we came with a long dress on she deserves some kind of special award.We spent a good amount of time there (and a good amou
nt of time getting back up -- it would have been easier had I remembered to bring a bottle of water with me -- again, i'm a very thirsty person!) After that we went back to the bach, relaxed and plotted our next move.To top off my perfect day, we had fried food for dinner. There's not much in this town, but of course there's a fish and chips spot. The fish and chips were delicious, but the absolute best part was the mussels. They have these awesome mussels in NZ and they get even better once they've been fried. They also have this curious thing called a "crab stick." I'm pretty sure it's just imitation crab meat chopped up and formed into a stick, covered in bread crumbs and fried. Kind of like a fish stick, but pinkish orange inside. It's a little weird, but not altogether bad. And we had some pizza, with some curious toppings but pretty tasty.
The moon was still pretty full from the night before so I was able to get some amazing photos from the po
rch. I learned when I got home that there was a lunar eclipse that day, but -- how interesting -- New Zealand was the only major temperate land mass where it could not be seen. (basically it was just NZ and Antarctica where it was not visible from at least some small portion of the land mass.) Once I returned home I realized that very often, when you see a map of the world used for some non-map purpose (like in ads, or on commercials, or something) they totally leave New Zealand off. I wonder if the Kiwis get offended by that.
