Well, after another extended gap between blog posts, here comes a couple to catch up. As I write right now, I am on a bus with the group on the way from Queenstown to Fox Glacier. Believe it or not, I have been swamped with schoolwork lately. In the past week, I’ve had to write a six page essay, three 250-word module essays, prepare for a debate, and I still have two more module essays and geography assignment due this week. It may not sound like much, but when you’re busy from 7 AM to 9 PM everyday, it can definitely feel like a lot. Of course, in the midst of all this schoolwork, I am still finding time to keep up with the Dawgs, Falcons, and Braves. I definitely love the Falcons’ free agency moves. It’s exciting to know we get to watch Tony G suit up for the birds for at least another year (maybe even two) and I’m excited to see what Steven Jackson will bring to the team. Down in Orlando, it seems like we’re going to have a lot to look forward to with the Bravos this year. If spring training is telling of how the Uptons and Teheran will perform this year, it could be a special year for the Braves. Anyway, since this is a blog about my trip and not a wannabe sports blog, I supposed I could get to the story that is my semester abroad.
So picking up where I left, not too much went on Wednesday night (March 6) as I predicted. The Alpine Lodge where we stayed was really cool though. Shockingly, it had a real lodge feel to it. It was made of timbers and nestled in a valley with Mount Cook towering in the distance. We shared rooms, but they had very comfortable beds and there was big common area with a living room space, a porch facing the mountain, and a kitchen where we did all of our own cooking for our time there. Once we got there, the cooking group for the evening (which I was not in) made dinner and we ate and went to bed fairly early.
The next morning, we woke up sort of early to do our hike before it got too hot. We met at the visitor center, had an introductory lecture from the park ranger for a couple hours, regrouped and set out for our hike. It was a pretty easy hike because we weren’t actually climbing the mountain. Mount Cook is 40% covered in glacier so to summit the mountain would be a whole different can of worms. The views were still unbelievable though and I made it out with some incredible pictures. The hike was just a basic back and forth, about 2 hours each way, but the destination was amazing. It was called Hooker Lake and it was created entirely by glacier run off, giving it a really milky color, and there were large pieces of the glacier floating around it, which was pretty neat. We had a mini-lecture there before heading to the lodge. Once we got back, it was about dinnertime and this time I was in the cooking group. We were having spaghetti, but we had leftover meat from the cookout the night before, so I was assigned to man the grill (which I thought was pretty sexist, but I got over it). After dinner, we had a species identification quiz over the plants we had been looking at all day, which I was better at than I thought. And afterwards, we had a group discussion and we’re given most of the night to relax and get work done (which no one did, but the relaxing was nice).
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