Back from vacation.
Tired and sore.
I suppose I can write a bit about the trip, but I'm not gonna write that much cuz much of it wouldn't be interesting for you to read. Basically I picked up the car on Sunday and went and picked up the bike that I bought so that I can get 15min. more sleep in the mornings before work. Then I came back and got Anne and we set off on our journey. First stop was Rotorua, it took about 5 hours to get there i think. I'm not a huge fan of rotorua, it's famous for it's hot springs and geyesers, but it really stinks like sulfur and the whole night we were there i kept waking up thinking, "my god it stinks". we didnt actually have time to do anything in rotorua becuase we had gotten a bit of a late start, but the next day we headed off to waitomo. waitomo is this area that is filled with caves. the caves are famous for having hundreds of glow worms in them. i've always thought of caves as holes in cliffs and around mountains, but these caves are underground and just under rolling green hills, they're pretty strange to me.
anyhow, we went on this awesome caving trip. we got all dressed up in full wetsuits and helmets with lights on them and such and rapelled down into this cave.
Once in the cave, we sloshed upstream through waist-deep freezing water and looked at the awesome glow worms. then we sat in inner tubes and floated downstream to more glow worms and cool formations and stuff. it was REALLY fun and we had hot tea and chocolate up in this little cranny of the cave.
The other guy in our group, Anne, and I in full gear for caving!
The view down into the dave, it was about 90ft. down to the bottom.
Me hanging on the ropes preparing to rappel down into the cave. (I have no idea how to spell rapell, rappel, rapel?)

that night we stayed in waitomo and the next day we took off for caroline's place in hamilton. caroline's dad owns a nursery which is on their property, so there's tons of flowers and trees and all sorts of cool stuff around her house. she also has a pool table which we made use of. then we headed off to her beach place in raglan, on the west coast of the north island.
the view from the beach place was really cool
This is looking out the door of the place.
The night there we went floundering. This means that we went out at 11pm, dressed in as many layers as we could fit on, on the top, and shorts and wetsuit booties. Then we waded around in the freezing cold bay with a light that we shone? underwater. Then we'd walk along looking for flounder on the bottom and if we saw one, we'd stab him and then take him home. We only found one flounder, but we did eat him and we had a really fun time floundering.
Anne and Caroline in floundering gear with the light out and hunting for the fishies.
Our dear flounder while being cooked. I didn't think to take a picture of him when he still had his head on, so this is the best I can do to show what we got.
The next day Caroline and I went surfing. I caught a couple waves and had a TON of fun, but it wasn't real surfing cuz we were just kind of joking around and not sitting out where the real waves were.
Next it was off to Whakapapa (pronounced fuck-a-papa) for some snowboarding. The views were beautiful, but I was a bit disappointed with the runs and the lifts at this place. The highest lifts were all T-bars, which means you don't sit, you have to hold on to this thing with your board still on the ground and it drags you up the hill. I had fun though and nearly killed myself trying to do a rail.
The view looking back.
It was strange cuz we didn't really drive in much snow and there wasn't much snow around the road. They also had TONS of snowmakers which I found really funny.
Anyways, during the trip the windshield on the stupid rental car got cracked and that cost me $330 NZ when I got back. It's not my fucking fault that a stupid rock flew up and hit the damn thing. That's a lot of money that I don't have going to something really stupid. GRRRRR....
yeah, so now i need to clean my room and do some homework, but i'm really, really sore for some reason. my right arm feels like it was torn off and then reattached after being used to bungy jump. yeah, that didn't make much sense, but whatever...