Snow Day In Christchurch

I woke up today to my first white July. Actually, my first white anything. It is amazing how beautiful things can be when there is a fresh layer of snow gently sitting on them. After staring at the backyard through the window for a while and eating our french toast, Emily and I decided to go to the park and try our hands at making a snowman. It took a little while to pile on the layers of socks, boots, gloves, coats, scarves and hats, but you can believe that we were both nice and toasty... except for the bits that snuck down our necks and into our boots. Now, you have to understand, snow in Christchurch is not as common a thing as you might think, so both of us were amateurs... but by the end we were feeling much more confident in our snowman-making skills. Here's a picture of our finished product, lovingly named Gus.

It was a very peaceful morning, aside from the cracking thunder that interrupted our snow-rolling. It must have run away from it's lightning, because it we never saw it strike, which made Emily think it might be a collapsing building. Luckily it wasn't.

The lazy snow day was a nice break after the amount of traveling I've done over the last two weeks. It started with a trip to Auckland with the Petrini family for the school holidays, which started last week and continue through the end of this week. We had a great time visiting all of the sights, including Sky Tower (which I endearingly and accidentally nicknamed The Space Needle), Rangitoto Island, Kelly Tarton's Antarctic Center (penguins!), Rainbow's End (the only theme park in New Zealand), and Matamata (the town now better known as Hobbiton). 

The view of Auckland from the top of Sky Tower

The Petrini girls and I at Rainbow's End

At the top of the crater of Rangitoto

It was a really fun week, and I loved Auckland. The day after we got back, I left again for youth camp up in Hanmer Springs (pronounced "Henma"... just switch the vowels around and you'll be good to go). We visited the hot springs that Hanmer is famous for, which was great except for the part where you have to get out of the water. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr! My toes definitely went numb in the first 5 minutes. It was fun, but I'm glad to be back at Robyn and Eric's place where there are heaters and electric blankets... and snow!