Busy Week!

I know it's been forever since I've written a post, but I've been a bit busy.

Last weekend our family went to Rotorua, a city in New Zealand. We went to a luge place where you ride on tracks on little luge vehicles. http://www.skyline.co.nz/rotorua/ssr_luge/ This is the site for what we did, I couldn't get any pictures.

We also went to a hot springs place, where people go and sit in hot springs pools.


After that I went on a 12km hike up part of Mt. Taranaki. It was a lot of fun, but I'm so out of shape that we had to stop twice just because I couldn't breathe! Very embarassing!

We had a lot of fun going up and coming back down was even better!

While going up, I fell into knee deep mud, shin deep mud, and foot deep mud. My life was peeerrrrfeeecccttttttt!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My friend Klara (end left girl in the group picture) was leaving this week, to go back to Germany, so we had a going away party for her at a place called Marbles (a buffet). We had so much fun and I'm going to miss her soooooo much!

 

 

 

 

Australia Trip

My host family and I just got back from our Holiday in Australia. To say the least, it was an amazing trip. For the first week and a couple days we stayed at Glen's sister's dairy farm, which was in Heywood. It was a neat experience. I was able to "help" milk the cows, granted I wasn't actually any help at all, but anyway... I got to put the milking pumps onto some of the cows (3 cows to be exact). I was a little afraid they would poop or pee on my head, so I didn't stay for long, gladly none of them did their bussiness on me.

While in Heywood we also went other places, such as Portland (not in Oregon) and Warrnambool. We basically went shopping in both of these areas, which was fun. I did manage to find some shirts, a skirt, and a dress so overall I did pretty good.

We also went back to Tower Hill (which I may have talked about before) and saw about 30-40 kangaroos, it was so cool and it was awesome to see them in the wild.

After that we drove up to Mebourne. We did a bunch of stuff there, including (but not limited to), going to the Werribee Open Range Zoo, Souvereign Hill, and a show called Witches in Britches.

At the Open range zoo you got to be within feet of dangerous animals. My family and I were the only people on the open range bus and it was amazing. I'm glad that we did the open range one, because it lasted longer and the other bus (a closed bus) barely stopped, where-as we stopped at every animal and our tour guide explained a lot about the animals we saw.

 

Souvereign Hill was also fun, it was a bit like Hale farm (for those Ohioans), but it talked about the gold rush in Ballarat, Australia. We went for the day and got to look at the "old shops" and one of the actual mines the miners used back in the day. We got to go on a Horse carriage around the town, a tour of the old mine, and then went to a light show that night. The light show wasn't what I expected but it was neat, and you were able to learn about the history of Ballarat.

We also went to the dinner show Witches in Britches when we very funny, the dinner was great, and the actors/waiters were very nice. They also had people come up on the stage (they were chosen from the people who were celebrating things). Overall it was a really great time.





Now I'm back in New Zealand and we have school Monday. I basically only have 4 weeks left of this year, as the Senior classes (years 11, 12, and 13) have exams.