new zealand is for pancakes: part 3 - driving a bit

are you bored of our new zealand trip yet? me neither. thus the two postings at once.

after we left abel tasman, we journeyed down the west coast, stopping to actually CAMP in our campervan (novel idea, huh?) at lake rotoroa, which was beautiful and beautifully dripping in sand flies. we couldn't even look out our window because all we saw were sand fly bums. so, the boy made us our first cooked meal together as hubs and wif (we're trying to come up with more unique titles for each other than husband and wife...we haven't gotten very far other than deleting a few letters from each).


in the morning, when courage is at its peak, we went outside to face the flies. it was totally worth the new 8 billion bites.

(check out that money shot taken by yours truly!)


then we started driving again and found a sign for a seal colony and, of course, stopped to see. the boy asked "how many seals do you think we'll see?" and i said (and was pretty confident) "probably six," which apparently is a little sparse for a colony...but for the record, i just looked it up and there's no limit to how few units there need to be to make a colony. so there. anyway, i was wrong just the same - there were probably a hundred seals.


which was a theme, because there were also a hundred direction markers on this sign.


next, we were off to the pancake rocks, which was a "must do" from everyone who's seen them (which is pretty much everyone because this was a HUGE tourist attraction, little beknownst to us." there are three cool things about the pancake rocks:

1. they're rocks that look like stacks of pancakes

imagine

mmmm....

i couldn't really come up with a point two or three, so i'll leave that up to your own creativity.

we saw rose and her friend at the pancake rocks, which was a little bit random. especially when rose said "i made a cd of pictures from your wedding from you, but i didn't bring it." how could you, rose? didn't you know you could run into us at any time halfway across your island?

and then i got philisophical and observed, "how wierd to think that if we hadn't gone to rose's for dinner, we wouldn't even know her. she'd still be here with her friend at the same time as us, but she'd be a total stranger right now." i felt a huge thesis coming on...but then the boy started laughing at me and said i was an odd duck. then i told him maybe i am, but i was born that way. HE was the one who had the choice to marry me.