SKI Holiday

This blog covers a short holiday we took in the South Island of New Zealand, in February 2008. Those of you who are good at geography will know that there is not much skiing of the snow variety at that time. You may also not that the name is capitals, it should more accurately be S.K.I. holiday.

The main purpose of the holiday was to drop our son Andrew off at Tai Poutini Polytechnic in Greymouth, where he is starting an Outdoor Recreation course. This means we will not be seeing much of hime for the next few months, effectively he has left home. As he is the third and final child of ours to leave the nest, this means we are now "Suddenly Kids Independant" according to Brian from the Hokitika holiday park we stayed at. It sounds like he gets a lot of similar couples of a certain age taking 'SKI holidays'!

Anyway, this blog will be written as a number of posts, one for each day, covering the highlights of the trip, including all the lovely walks we found, and some of the 320 photographs we took.

Our plan was to spend 3 nights in Hokitika, making sure Andrew was settled in to his accomodation, and finding a few nice things to do in that area. We were then going to go further down the west coast to Franz Joseph and Fox Glacier area, including a planned walk at Okarito Lagoon. We then planned to use the Haast pass to get to Wanaka, to see what was available there. Out next destination was over the Lindis pass to Mount Cook, where we planned some more Glacier viewing for a couple of days, and finally back over the Arthur's pass to Greymouth, to do a final check on our son, before heading home. As the whole trip had to fit into 9 days, it was always going to be abit rushed.

We bought a new tent for the trip, just a two man pup tent, and planned to camp as much as we could after we left Hokitika, but were very aware of the West Coast and Southern Alps weather tendencies!

Ferries were booked back in December, and we were using the Bluebridge service, as we like the friendly way the ships are operated.

Thats the reasoning for the trip etc covered, let's get stuck in!