Milli Vanilli

Well friends,

A good amount of adventure has happend since last post. Allow me to share...

So we stayed a few more days in Dunedin. Turns out we got to stay at the hostel for free because we got along really well with the owners and they let us stay for free if I gave them massages. Its was cool.
So our plan was to hitch about 4 hours from dunedin to Christchurch. Our first ride was our friend Alex that we met in Wanaka. He was the swiss guy that gave us a ride to Queenstown. He just happend to be passing by when we were hitching. It was cool. He gave us a ride about half way. After Alex we just kept going from little town to little town until we got picked up be a Semi carrying like 2oo+ sheep. That was fun. He took us to our friends in Southbridge right outside of Christchurch that we stayed with at the beginning of our journey. We were there for a few days and then headed north up to a cute beach town called Kaikora.

We were there for 2 nights. Then we hitched back down south about half way to christchurch to try and take a road to the west coast. Well it is a tiny road and not many pass on it. One of the only cars to pass us was our friend Ralph! He was one of our German friends we met in Franz Josef and then again in Dunedin. So random. He was going to blenheim, which is a few hours north of Kaikora. We were so excited to see him and didn't know if we would get picked up again on that road so we just went back up north with him.

We went to church in Blenheim. That was really nice. A member had us over for lunch and had a good chat. We also met some members who were visiting from Nelson which is 2 hours northwest of blenheim. They said if we needed a place to stay we could call them if we were in Nelson. Little did they know how much we would take them up on their offer.

We were on our way out of Blenheim getting ready to hitch and we passed a little lot with a bunch of old used cars for sale. And they were way cheap. We hadn't had they best hitching luck the past few days so a car looked pretty good. We found a red 1988 toyota camry wagon. It was pretty ghetto but it had alot of charm. We fell in love with it and just bought it on a whim from some chinese guy that barely spoke english for 650.00 nz dollars, which is about 500 american dollars. And we figured we could just sell it when we left because people do that all of the time.

Since we now had a car we decided to go to Nelson instead of to the west coast for reasons that are not important enough to explain. The car got us to Nelson just fine. We called up some our member friends the Chattertons and they took us out to dinner and then to the Hippolites to sleep. Two very awesome families. Well, the hippolites had us take our car to a mechanic because our muffler was so loud and we could get a ticket for it. Long story short, to make our car safe for the road we would need to replace all four tires, get a new muffler, fix the speedometer, and who knows what else.....

With much contemplation we have decided to junk the car. It would cost too much for us for it to be worth driving for 2 months and it guzzles gas like none other. We lovingly named it Milli Vanilli because it was not as good as it seemed and didn't last very long. We took it around town to junk yards and no one even wanted it!!

So we decided to just leave it somewhere and take the plates as souvineirs. That was the plan until the wonderful Roma Hippolite talked to a mechanic at church. He said that he would take it and fix it up and then give it to someone in the branch that could use it! See, now it wasn't such a waste of money after all!

So we have been staying in Nelson at the hippolites for almost a week now. They are such a fun couple. Their kids are away at school so they love having us around to entertain them. A few kids just got in today because they are on a school break. We are havin a grand ol time. Now since this post is way too long I will post later about our magical trip to abel tasman national park where we slept with possums!!

Ok, until next time!! much love!