Roadtrip Day 2: Cave Paintings, Epic Lunches and Aoraki

Part 1: New Zealand has this amazing system of little brown signs pointing out any and all sites of interest for tourists. It's great. We passed a sign for cave paintings by early Polynesian settlers of New Zealand, so we had plenty of fair warning to dock the spaceship (okay, I lied, we really just pulled over and parked the minivan...) and take a look around. It was super interesting!!! This is one of the best pictures we took of the drawings.

Part 1 and 1/2?: Dad was really excited about all the irrigation that is done here. They use these massive things to irrigate pasture land (mostly for sheep and cows, although there are also some deer farms here), and we have lots and lots of pictures of fields and cows and fences and irrigation, so I figured I should give it a mention :)

Part 2: Lunch was epic. (That is not entirely the correct usage of epic but we can ignore that for now.) We had smoked salmon sandwiches on fresh bread with smoked cheddar cheese and pesto, and fresh strawberries for dessert. Yes, it is indeed strawberry season :) The best part, however, was the scenery- Lake Pukaki and Mt. Cook!!!

Part 3: You guessed it, Aoraki/Mt. Cook again :) This was my favorite picture, after sunset when the valley and all the other mountains are dark but the tip of Mt. Cook is still in the daylight. It was very pretty!

We did some hiking around the base of Mt. Cook that afternoon, on the Hooker Valley trail. The view at the end was great, with Mt. Cook, the Hooker Glacier and the lake from the glacier. There were some pretty fun suspension bridges too!