Skipper's Canyon

10-14-13 Written by Charles

Today we went on the tour of the back hills of New Zealand.  It was pretty cool, but the end was the best.  I’m not saying anything bad about the tour.  It’s just we panned for specks of gold!  I got a flake of gold about the size of two or three grains of sand in a triangle.  Sadly it blew away in the wind.  It was only worth about a cent (American Dollars), so I didn’t lose my fortune.

The other really exciting part was that we saw the Ford of Brunhen.  It was an important scene in the Lord of the Rings.  The Lord of the Rings was entirely filmed in New Zealand.  Our tour guide was one of the people that helped organize all the transportation for the movies!

We are staying in Queenstown, which is right smack in the center of the South Island.  There is the second largest lake in New Zealand right in front of our condo.  There aren’t really any buildings over three stories tall in Queenstown.  (Our condo is a small house!) There are massive mountains all around the lake and the town.  The town is built on the rolling hills, and the mountains just pop out of the hills.  If there was no town it could come right from a scene in the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit.  The lake is so cold that if you swam in it for twenty minutes with a normal swimsuit on you would die.  The town is a modern town, but there is still a warm and cozy feeling about it.

Written by William October 14, 2013

This week we went off-roading in the mountains, called Skippers Canyon. During the gold rush in NZ all the people went digging for gold. They got 6 tons of gold in the first 6 months. Back then there was a city called Charles Town; now it is just ruins. We were boring and did school the rest of the day.

10-15-13 Written by Charles

Today was supposed to be a rest day.  If you’re with the Flaherty’s, there is no such thing as a rest day.  We did school in the morning, and we were supposed to do something fun in the afternoon.  It was the first sunny day since we got to New Zealand, so we wanted to go skydiving.  William was just under the weight limit, but he didn’t want to go.  We were going to do a fifteen thousand feet jump!  My dad and I signed all the papers, and we got to the airstrip.  Then we saw it coming.  It was a massive rainstorm.  The winds kicked up to high for the jump before we even left the ground.  Skydiving was canceled sadly.  Tomorrow we are going on an overnight cruise on the eastern shore, which might be boring or fun.