After 33 hours of travel (2 hour long car rides, 3 flights and 2 lay-overs) Erin and I have finally arrived at our hotel for the night. We are already big fans of New Zealand. We haven't even made it anywhere special yet, and the farms with the mountain backgrounds are already beautiful. The other thing is everything is different like foreign countries should be but everyone here speaks english, at least depending on the strength of their accent. But everyone we've met so far has been incredibly nice. We have rented a car to drive around the island with and it has been fun driving on the wrong side of the car and road. The only problem so far is I'm concentrating so hard on not killing us, that I keep turning on the windshield wipers instead of signaling a turn. Tomorrow our plan is to drive about 3 hours and relax and explore the area around Mt. Cook. It should be fun.