2024 Travels

The photos uploaded end to beginning and it is a lot of work to switch them all around, so we will just be recounting the journey from back to front. We ended in Queenstown which is where we are all flying out from, but I stayed a few extra days since  I did not need to be back for the spring semester. Those adventures will be in a separate post! Queenstown is surrounded by mountains and was what I was hoping the entire country looked like, I love the jagged rock peaks, as opposed to the more grassy hills. There is a huge lake in Queenstown too, which was almost perfect for sunset viewing, but the sun went down behind that hill to the right so you couldn't see it touch the horizon. We visited a sheep farm, it was quite an experience and they triggered my allergies like crazy. I was crying and blowing my nose and rubbing my eyes all day and into the next. The sheep also smell like booty, I could not be a farmer, the smells are just too intense. One of the girls also fainted while we...

One of the days we went on a 19 km hike, which all of our watches said was more than 19 km, called the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. We heard that it was supposed to rain and we were all a bit apprehensive about doing such a hike in the rain, but when we arrived at the start, the landscape looked so magical with the sun shining through the clouds. This is the mountain that we are crossing! Started out as a nice sunny and warm day... but the clouds rolled in as we increased in altitude. It was nice for a bit because it meant we weren't burning up and we didn't have to layer on the sunscreen. Some blue geothermal lakes in the middle of the hike, they contributed to the *wonderful* smell that we got for part of the way down. The clouds blocked our view of most everything unfortunately, and it started raining. Wow what a view from the top! This trip was full of 0.5 selfies This would be a lot more stunning if the clouds were not there This is still an active volcano, and it last erupt...