Hari Hari

Presently, I have found myself at UC’s field station at Hari Hari on the west coast of the south island. The drive over was long, but gorgeous. We're here as the last stretch of our Environmental Ethics course. As always, it's lovely to get out of Christchurch and I do enjoy field stations. Three days in and this trip is FAR less emotionally charged than our last trek to a fieldstation. We have four more days though, so it's anyone's guess.
To get here we drove through the mountains and saw a lot of bridges that wouldn't count as bridges in the US. One in particular was a long one lane bridge over a braided river that was also a train bridge. Eeek! We also shared the road for a time with a cattle drive. We spent most of the 4+ hour journey singing to songs that nobody quite knew all of the words to. Favorites were "Walking in Memphis" and Third Eye Blind's (and one of my personal favorites) "Semi-Charmed Life."
Yesterday we went on a hike. The trail, technically, was closed because a good portion of it kind of fell into the sea. However, we followed the white-baiter's bushwacked trail and eventually met up with the main trail. It was good to get out and move some and it was pretty cool with the ocean on one side of me and Mt. Cook (Aoraki) and Mt. Tasman to the other side. I did get a sweet picture of a fantall, too. We spent what seemed like forever picking our way through boulders that weren't really a trail as the tide rose. We then walked across a moonscape, found quicksand, and re-wrote all of the songs that we could think of that contained the word, "girl" to have the word, "squirrel." It was a good hike.

Today it rained. It rained a lot. It stopped for a while and now it's raining again. Bucket loads of rain. Pouring raing. Rainy rain. I love it. I've missed rain. I can't wait for summer thunderstorms!

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In addition, Philip brought his HUGE telescope and showed us Saturn and myriad nebulas. It was pretty sweet. Also, on Spaghetti night, Jane thought to push some tables together, through a table cloth on, and pick wildflowers and stick them in a vase. It was really nice.