It has been a long time since we've updated...life got crazy busy and as much as we love sharing, we would rather be spending our time having new adventures that writing about old ones. Sorry for the delay but we should be back in business from here on out. Since we last updated we've had a thousand new adventures, we spent another winter as snowboard instructors in Telluride, we took several long road trips, we moved back up to Alaska for the summer....but the biggest adventure so far has been getting married!

On April 10, 2017 we said "I Do" at the Joslyn Castle in Omaha, Nebraska. We chose the castle because it was built by one of Steven's ancestors, George Joslyn, at the turn of the century and Nebraska is right smack in the middle of the country so all of our friends and family had to travel about the same distance. We did all of the wedding planning ourselves, which was a huge learning experience for both of us. We didn't have a theme, but we did try to add as many personal touches as possible to the day so that everything would have more meaning to us.
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George Joslyn made his fortune in the newspaper industry so our invitations and programs were both designed to look like old newspapers. I even wrote several articles about George and Sarah Joslyn and the history of the castle. You can see our invitation paper if you follow this link. We also used vintage newspaper ad paper bags as envelopes and to make banners and hanging flowers for the reception.

​Steven also made me a shawl out of our plaid, and I used it to make my own shoes out of a pair of grey Toms. All of the bridesmaids had a plaid shawl as well, and a small plaid flower on their shoes. I wore fossilized mammoth-ivory earrings made by an artist from our summer home in Skagway, and the pearls that my grandmother sent me when I was a little girl. My bouquet was made of orchids and lillies, since the Joslyns used to grow orchids in their home and their daughter's wedding bouquet had lillies in it. We also decorated the castle and the reception area with live orchids.

Our ring-bearer Jovin carried a ring pillow made from our wedding plaid and mounted on a slice of an Aspen tree from the place where we were engaged; Telluride, Colorado. The rings we chose are made of titanium with a beautiful wood burl inlay and we had "Jamm Soom" engraved inside, which is Seereer for "Peace Only." For the ceremony we wrote our own vows, and our niece Justice did an amazing job reading a cute little poem called "Marriage is Madness." We wanted to keep the ceremony short and sweet, so it only lasted about 30 minutes. We used a Navajo wedding vase in our ceremony that was made in Four Corners and given to us by Steve's parents.

​About halfway through our picnic it started to rain, so we moved everything into the Volkswagen Bus that was going to take us to the reception and finished eating at the little table inside. We had contacted the local VW club to find a bus that matched Steven's old bus as closely as possible and, the owner was even nice enough to let Steve take it for a lap around the park!

We held the reception at the pavilion at Hanscom Park, the oldest public park in Omaha, which used to house a greenhouse donated by the Joslyns. We served a build your own sandwich style lunch with a lot of fruits and veggies, and had tea, lemonade and old fashioned glass bottle sodas. We had a naked-style cake with butter cream frosting in between the layers, and topped with lots and lots of fresh fruit. We had made our own cake stand out of a slice of a Sitka spruce tree from the zipline where we met in Alaska, but the cake company forgot to bring it (that was the only bad part of the day).

​After the reception everyone had time to go home and change, and we had an informal beer reception at Infusion Brewing company later in the evening where we served a beer we brewed ourselves! When I was looking for a place to have an after-party Infusion brewing company offered us their tasting room as well as the opportunity to brew our own beer for the wedding. We chose the style and they helped us create a recipe and brew it from the hops up! We traveled to Omaha in February to work with our brewer, and we ended up going with an Apple-wheat beer that we named "Apple of my Eye."

It was such a great day to get to spend with family and friends, and we are so grateful to everyone who celebrated with us both in Omaha and in spirit! We're really looking forward to many more adventures together as Mr. and Mrs. Joslin!

February turned out to be a bit of a strange month as far as weather goes in Telluride. Typically we get our biggest and best snowstorms in this part of the winter, but after 60" of powder in January the snow gods must have gotten confused and thought it was time for spring. The last month has been marked by uncharacteristically high temperatures and weeks of sunshine. That might sound nice to those of you who are sick of shoveling out your driveway, but on a ski resort 50 degrees and sunny is cause for alarm. We were lucky that we had such above-average snowfall at the beginning of the season, because over the last month we've lost a lot of our base. With no fresh snow on the mountain, motivation to ride has been a bit low for us, so we've been spending lots of our time off in the library trying to plan our wedding, or traveling outside of Telluride to find some other adventures. 

The one upside to not having a lot of powder-days is we finally got the chance to go ice climbing in Ouray without feeling like we were missing out on good snow. We managed to make two climbing trips in February and considering the warm temperatures and the amount of the river that had thawed in the canyon they will probably be our only trips this season. Both times we left Telluride the night before and camped in our truck in the parking lot so that we could get up bright and early and climb all day. On our first trip we met some really great people from Northern California who we were able to swap routes with, and at the end of the day they even shared their crockpot dinner with us back at their hotel! Our second time in Ouray we brought along Steve's cousin Tyler for his first ever ice climbing adventure. We managed to get in quite a few climbs on three different routes, including one with a chimney-style crux between two pillars of ice that challenged all of us to our limits of strength and flexibility.

Just when we had resigned ourselves to nothing but spring-skiing for the rest of the season, the snow gods blew back in with a little two day storm at the end of the month. Although the base of the mountain only got about 4" in 48 hours, the upper slopes got pounded, and that plus a bit of wind-loading made for the best run on Palmyra either of us has ever had. We had planned on hiking to Mountain Quail, about a 30 minute hike from the top of lift 12, but we got there just as ski patrol was opening the peak, so we decided to go all the way and we were rewarded with waist deep turns on untouched powder. Neither of us had ever been all the way to the summit of Palmyra before, preferring to drop just below on a run called Tramshot, but after two hours of climbing through knee-deep drifts we knew it would be worth it to go all the way. The snow was so deep we never even touched the bottom!

We've only got a few more weeks here in Telluride before we pack up and head up to Alaska for the summer. Its crazy how fast this winter has flown by, but looking back we've had a lot of really great adventures so we really can't complain. Spring break is coming up in the next few weeks, so we'll both be busy teaching for ski school almost every day of the week. Between working, packing and planning a wedding its going to be a busy last month in paradise.

Finding time to go all the way to the library to use the internet has proven difficult this past month with all the amazing snow we've been getting here in Telluride. Over 60 inches of fresh Powder meant the best January the resort has seen in about 10 years, and with our part-time ski school schedule we were able to enjoy every minute of it. We had several great powder-days in the trees and bumps off of lifts 7, 8, 9 and 14, and throughout the month we ticked off some epic runs on the resorts hike-to terrain. We had a couple of good runs on Chutes 8 and 9, a few knee-deep laps on Bald Mountain, some face-shots off of Mountain Quail and Genevieve, and a 90 minute hike up Palmyra (13,470') for some fresh turns on it's first day open this season.

When we weren't busy shredding the pow we did manage to make time for a little professional development. We both passed our American Association of Snowboard Instructors Level 1 exams, which makes us much more "official" as snowboard instructors, and also comes with a bit of a raise for the rest of the season. The exam consisted of 3 days of riding and two written exams. We were tested on our ability to teach, assess the biomechanics of snowboarding, and of course our snowboarding skills. The exam was held here in Telluride and we took it along with 6 of our coworkers, so it was super convenient and we had a lot of fun.

Towards the end of the month Steve's family came out for a visit, and we got to spend 3 days showing them around our winter wonderland. The kids got to go sledding and build a snowman, and on their second day in town the kids went to ski school while the adults rented ski bikes so we could give them a tour of the mountain. At the end of the day Steve proposed to me at the top of lift 10 in front of the Enchanted forest, so our big news for the month is that we're getting married! It's certainly been a very eventful month for us, even if it's not that interesting to read about. February has already been off to an adventure-filled start, but you'll have to wait for the next post to read all about it.

The last two months of 2015 have been full of changes, and we're just now settling down into a routine that might give us some time to update this website every now and then. We wrapped up our time in New Zealand at the end of October with one final road trip back to Christchurch and 30 hours of flights back to New Jersey. We spent a few weeks in the Garden State recuperating from all of the travel, and one long weekend bartending for the food truck festival at Laurita Winery before loading up the truck to head out to our next adventure.

On November 16th we embarked on a 6 day, 50 hour road trip 2/3 of the way across the country, passing through 7 states on our way to Telluride, Colorado. After losing all of our kitchen supplies off of the roof of the truck on our last major road trip we ordered a new rack for the roof of the cab so we could re-arrange all of our belongings. It arrived in the afternoon of the day we planned on leaving without any installation instructions, so we didn't manage to get on the road until well into the evening. We drove just a few hours to Amish Country in Pennsylvania then slept for the night in the parking lot of a hardware store.

We woke up the next morning with a horse and buggy parked next to us, and spend the morning exploring some of the little shops around town before we went for lunch at the Rumspringa Brewing Company in Intercourse (yes, that's the name of the town!). Rumspringa translates to "running around," and refers to the time that Amish youth spend exploring the outside world before they decide whether or not to commit to officially joining the Church and living the Amish lifestyle.

After lunch we left the farmland behind and stopped briefly in Hershey, Pennsylvania to check out the Hershey museum and buy some giant Reeses peanut butter cups before continuing on the road. Our late departure from New Jersey really threw off our schedule, but even though we passed through Wayne, OH at nearly midnight, we still got to stop by my Aunt Lois' bakery for a quick visit and the worlds best sugar cookies.

We drove as far as we could manage into the night, so that the next day we would have as much time as possible to spend at Starved Rock State park in Oglesby, Illinois. The area right along the Illinois river is rich with Native American history and is criss-crossed with hiking trails that lead to huge sandstone canyons. Although the fall is typically too dry for the waterfalls to run there had been a recent storm so we were treated to amazing cascades in every canyon that we visited. It felt great to get out of the truck and stretch our legs and we spent the better part of the afternoon exploring all of the trails. On the way out of town we stopped at a little bakery called Two Girls, One Cupcake that specialized in all kinds of quirky cupcakes and was guarded by an enormous pink yeti at the door. That evening we stopped at the Worlds Largest Truckstop off of I-80 in Walcott, Iowa for a traditional trucker's dinner (fast food) and a stroll around their truck-accessory store that was so big it had 3 18-wheelers parked inside as displays. The Worlds Largest Truckstop also had a chapel, a movie theater, a gift shop, full shower facilities, 2 arcades and parking for 900 trucks! Needless to say we drove on to a quieter rest-stop before calling it a night.

The next morning I woke up early to drive the rest of the way into Omaha, Nebraska where we had plans to tour the Joslyn Castle, a 4-story 35 room Scottish Baronial mansion built in 1903 by some distant relatives of Steve's on his dad's side. George and Sarah Joslyn were entrepreneurs and philanthropists who arrived in Omaha with just the clothes on their backs, and ended up becoming the richest people in the city in the early 1900s. When they died they left their estate to the City and it was used for years as the headquarters for the Omaha Public Schools before being restored by the Joslyn Castle Trust. Since Steve's relationship to the Joslyn's practically makes him the Prince of Omaha, the nice ladies in the office gave us the opportunity to join in on a private tour free of charge.

The mansion is full of such incredible details... beautifully carved exotic (and in some cases extinct) wood, intricate tile mosaics, ornate stained glass, fireplaces, chandeliers, technological advances that were cutting edge in the early 1900s, towers, greenhouses, gardens, a ball room and at one time a whole room devoted to a massive pipe organ. Restoring the wallpaper in just the entrance hall had cost well over $200,000. The whole house was an amazing work of art and engineering. After our tour of the castle we headed to the other side of the city to see the Joslyn Art museum, built by Sarah Joslyn in 1930 as a memorial after George's death. After our long day we met up for dinner and drinks with an old friend of Steve's that he hadn't seen in almost 10 years before getting back on the road.

We spent the majority of the next day just trying to make it through the rest of Nebraska. Its not as bad of a drive as Kansas, but it's a close second... just a long flat straight road. The highlight of the day was stopping at California Hill in Brule, Nebraska. It was climbed by thousands of covered wagon emigrants heading west on the Oregon trail between 1841 and 1860. Apparently the wagon ruts are still visible today, but the ground was too snowy and muddy for us to make out much. We finally crossed into Colorado and stopped in Ft. Collins to visit our friend Craig from Alaska and spend the night. The next morning we fulfilled our annual road-trip tradition by stopping at Voodoo Donut in Denver before pressing on across the state and arriving in Telluride  at 8pm.

We had a few days to settle into our (very small) room in company housing and two days to ride the mountain before we had to attend "snow college," the final stage in the interview process to become snowboard instructors. On the finally day of college we received our job offers as part-time instructors, Steve was assigned to children and I was assigned to adults. We then spent 4 days training with the two best instructors on the mountain before having almost two weeks off before we started work. Just before the busy Christmas season we were given the opportunity to shadow another instructors lesson before being thrown into the deep end at the busiest time of the year.

Since two days a week at ski school would barely even cover our groceries, both of us also spent our early days in town looking for night jobs. I got hired on as a gondola operator 3 nights as week from 4:15 until 12:45am, and Steve got a job with a local restaurant as a busser and food runner. Since we were both working double shifts on Christmas we celebrated quietly on Christmas Eve with an early dinner at one of our favorite restaurants. So far the early season snow has been amazing, and it looks like el-Nino is going to give us the best snow season either of us has ever seen!

We chose to settle in Queenstown because of the nearby ski fields, but the town also has a reputation for being the adventure capital of New Zealand.  Although the majority of the activities were well out of our price range (even with working five jobs between us) we still managed to do a few crazy things over our six months in town. 

When we first arrived in Queenstown we took a job with Ziptrek EcoTours, guiding guests on 4 or 6 ziplines on top of Bob's Peak overlooking Queenstown. It was a bit different than the zipline we worked on in Alaska... there were no flips or tricks allowed and our tour was scripted right down to the jokes we were supposed to tell. I wouldn't exactly consider it an adventure activity, but the views were beautiful and as guides we were given the opportunity to do a few of the other tours in town for free. We spent as much time as we could in the winter trying to get our money's worth out of our ski passes, and between zipline guiding, go-kart supervising, babysitting, and working at the airport we didn't have many days off together to do anything else. Luckily we had a much lighter schedule for our last two weeks in New Zealand with only one job each, so we were able to cram in quite a few adventures.

The zipline was located at the top of the Skyline Gondola along with quite a few other activities, such as mountain biking trails, tandem paragliding, a street luge track and a bungy jump. Queenstown is the home of the worlds first bungy jump, off of the Kawarau Bridge, and the same company operates this shorter but more scenic jump overlooking Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu as well. Although the drop is only 154 feet, its location on the side of the mountain makes it feel much higher. We had both been bungy jumping before in Washington, but we couldn't pass up an opportunity to do a free jump in the town where it all got started. Unlike a traditional jump where the cord is attached at the ankles, we were given a full body harness and attached by the waist which gave us the ability to do different jump styles. I opted for a running front flip and Steve did a handstand into a forward dive.

Another activity we got the opportunity to experience through our jobs at Zip Trek was the Shotover Canyon Swing, billed as the worlds highest cliff jump. From a platform 357 feet over the Shotover river we got to experience a 196 foot free fall, but instead of bouncing back up like a bungee jump we swung out in a 656 foot arc over the canyon below. The rope was connected to the harness at the waist, giving us the opportunity to plunge to possible death in whatever manner seemed best. I chose my signature front flip, and Steve decided to step off sideways while staring straight down to get the full effect of the free fall. After our first solo jumps they gave us the opportunity to go a second time for free, so we decided to do a tandem jump, strapped together at the hip. This time we swung out slowly over the canyon and hung upside down to stare down at the river before our jumpmaster released us. You know what they say, the couple that plummets towards the ground together stays together... or something like that.

After enjoying the Shotover river from above, we decided to get a closer look with a ride on a Jetboat. Shotover Jet has been around since 1965, and was one of the first adventure activities in Queenstown. The jetboat is a very iconic New Zealand activity, and we didn't want to leave the country without experiencing a ride in one. Rather than having a propeller at the back of the boat, jetboats draw water through a pump inside the boat, and eject it out the back allowing them to operate at speed in water only 3 inches deep. Our driver was able to skim across the surface of the shallow river at 60mph, barely dodging the canyon walls as he expertly maneuvered past giant boulders and executed 360 degree spins. The ride lasted over 25 minutes, and we had such a good time that when we got back we decided to pay $20 for a second ride. At $150 for nearly an hour of jetboating, we felt like it was the best value for our money activity that we did in our entire stay in New Zealand.


Check out the Movie page for videos from our adventures in Queenstown and see more photos here.

Our time in New Zealand is coming to a close pretty quickly, but there are a few more places we want to see before we leave and Dunedin was at the top of the list. In another life I had strongly considered getting my Masters in Kinesiology from the University of Otago in Dunedin, so I was especially curious to see the place I would have spent two years of my life. Dunedin is a mid-size city  situated on the East coast of the South Island, about 3 hours from Queenstown. We managed to trade a rainy and windy day in Queenstown for warm sunny weather in Dunedin, and after eating lunch at Velvet Burger we spent a leisurely afternoon wandering around down town and admiring all of the beautiful architecture.

There are a lot of really impressive old stone buildings in Dunedin, but our favorite was the old train station. It took three years to build out of local granite and basalt, and was opened in 1906. At its peak it could handle over 100 trains in a day, but today its just visited by a couple of sightseeing trains and the building is also used as an information center, bus stop and art gallery. Living in Queenstown, which is a major tourist destination, where things are open all week, we had forgotten that the majority of places in New Zealand virtually shut down on Sundays. Dunedin, on the other hand, is more of a "normal" city so we weren't able to look in any of the cute little shops or have coffee in any of the quaint cafés, but we did manage to snag a spot in a tour of the Cadbury chocolate factory.

The Cadbury factory in Dunedin manufactures all of the New Zealand specific candies... things we had never heard of before we arrived here like Jaffas, Crunchie bars, Pebbles and Snowballs. We started our tour by exploring their little chocolate museum in the visitors center where they explained the history of the Cadbury company and displayed all of the old candy wrappers and marketing materials. Then we were led "backstage" by a tour guide in purple overalls who explained to us how chocolate is made and a bit about the process behind the manufacture of different candies. We didn't actually get to see inside the factory for "health and safety" reasons, but we did get to spend time in a sensory room where we got whiffs of the different chocolate flavors from giant PVC pipes on the wall and we got to design our own melted chocolate treat for consumption with tiny wooden spoons. At the end of the tour we climbed to the top of a giant silo where we watched over 1 ton of liquid chocolate pour from the ceiling in a giant cascading waterfall. It had nothing to do with making chocolate... they just do it because they can.

During the tour we learned that the steepest street in the world was just on the other side of town, so of course we had to go check it out. At its steepest point, Baldwin Street goes up at a staggering 35% gradient, so for every 2.8 meters you walk you gain 1 meter of elevation. The road is so steep that the sidewalk is actually a staircase, and the top of the road is paved in concrete rather than asphalt, because on a hot day the tar would melt and the asphalt would actually slide down the street. Our car struggles enough just getting up our driveway, so we figured it was safest to just park it at the bottom and walk up. The street is incredibly steep, but not very long and we made it to the top in less than 5 minutes and were rewarded with a pretty cool view over the city. The rain clouds that we had left behind in Queenstown began to roll in just as we got back to the bottom of the hill, and we made it back to the car just as the first drops began to fall. The drive back to Queenstown was wet and windy, but by the time we made it home the bad weather had cleared up and the stars were out.

For more pictures of this beautiful town check out the Photos post.

Two weeks ago we woke up to a gloriously sunny day, and with just a few weeks left in New Zealand we decided it was too good to waste. We've been living just 45k from Glenorchy all winter and had never made the drive out, so we decided to hop in the car and have an adventure. Glenorchy is a little one horse town, with just a gas station, a general store and a few cafés, but it has some amazing scenery and was the setting for quite a few scenes in the Lord of the Rings. We had brunch at the Glenorchy Café and enjoyed pancakes and pulled pork sandwiches in their back garden in the sunshine and then took a walk down to the lake shore. From the lake we noticed what looked like a trail up one of the smaller mountains in the middle of the valley, so we stopped in the store to ask about it and found out it was a fairly straightforward hike.

After a short drive out of town we parked the car at the trail head, slathered on some sunscreen and headed into the trees. The first two-thirds of the trail was steep switch-backs through the forest that reminded us a lot of hiking in Alaska. The trail was well marked with orange blazes, despite the fact that steep terrain and heavy brush made it pretty much impossible to step off the trail even if you wanted to. Once we reached the tree line, however, the trail markers completely disappeared and the final one-third of the climb was an extremely steep scramble through the tussocks and spear grass and over loose rock. After an hour of clinging to clumps of grass to try and stay on the unstable and near-vertical mountainside we crested the ridgeline and realized we had missed the trail and had been following a goat track instead.

Once we were on the established trail the going was much easier and we made it to the summit just as the weather started to take a turn for the worse. The wind picked up and dark clouds started rolling in, so after 4 hours of climbing we only spent about two minutes on the summit before making a beeline for the treeline. The views from the summit were well worth the effort though, from 1,375 meters we had a full panoramic view of the Dart and Rees river valleys and Lake Wakatipu. The hike down had its own challenges and even on the right trail the terrain was very steep and we were constantly setting off little rockslides. Still we made much better progress on the way down, and reached the trees in about a quarter of the time it took us on the way up. The rest of the descent took about 2 hours and we reached the car just as the first serious raindrops started to fall. Our timing with the weather couldn't have been more perfect!

You can see more pictures from this beautiful hike here.

A few weeks ago, Steve and I managed to wrangle another day off together, and we decided to make the most of it by doing something a bit different. I found a good deal on cross country ski rentals and a trail pass for the Snow Farm, so we woke up early and headed out of town. The snow farm was an hours drive over the mountain along the same road we traveled to go to Treble Cone for our birthdays. As we wound up the road past golden-brown grass covered hills it was hard to have faith that there would be enough snow up there to go cross country skiing. Even when we arrived at the access road for the snow farm the mountains were still bare, but as we rounded the final bend all of a sudden we were surrounded by white. The same phenomenon occurs when we go snowboarding... because the climate is just too mild for snow to survive anywhere but at the very tops of the mountains in the shaded areas.

When we arrived at the Snow Farm we found out they were gearing up for a big cross country ski race the next day, and we felt a bit out of place surrounded by a bunch of Lycra-clad athletes springing around the trails. The skis we were given were thinner than the cross country skis we have at home, designed more for racing than exploring the back country, but they didn't take too much getting used to. We decided to leave the racing crowd behind and set out on the Loop Trail, a 13 kilometer round trip that would take us over gently rolling hills  and past the Meadow Hut. It took us about three hours to reach the hut, where we stopped to warm up a bit and eat the lunch we had packed before continuing the last few kilometers back to the base building. We debated exploring another one of the shorter trails, but decided to save our energy so we could go night skiing at Coronet Peak.

We drove back into town around 4pm and treated ourselves to Domino's before headed up to the mountain. Neither of us had ever been night skiing before and we weren't quite sure what to expect. The sunset from the top of the mountain was spectacular, and we soon got used to the darkness in-between light-towers. The evening was warm and the snow was quite soft and slushy, so after a few hours on the main chair we decided to head over to the beginner lift and work on some tricks. We've both been concentrating this season on learning to ride switch (with our opposite foot forward) and we spent the last few hours working on 360s, tail and nose presses and buttering. We won't  be joining the x-games anytime soon, but we both made good progress on new skills and had a lot of fun riding together.

One of the perks of having our birthdays just two days apart is that it gives us a great excuse to spend a little extra money to do something special. So after several months of working multiple jobs and saving every penny, we took the day off in between our birthdays and took a trip to Treble Cone in Wanaka for a day of snowboarding. We jumped on a bus at 745 in the morning, slept most of the 90 minute drive to the mountain, and had our tickets by 10am. Following the bus drivers advice, we headed straight for the top of the mountain, and we weren't disappointed. After a warm up lap we hiked up to the top of the mountain and we found the closest thing to powder we've seen in New Zealand, as well as one of the best views yet.

After our hike we spent the rest of the day on the Saddle Basin lift, enjoying the best runs on the mountain. Our favorite spot was a run called Super Pipe, a huge drain with 30ft walls that acted as a natural half pipe. Even after the clouds moved in and the visibility started to deteriorate the snow in Super Pipe was still good. Of the three mountains that we've ridden in New Zealand so far, Treble Cone was the closest thing to a "proper" ski resort. The beginner and advanced areas didn't overlap, the difficult runs were actually challenging, the runs were well-marked, the lift ramps were well-maintained, they didn't groom every run to within an inch of its life, and maps were available everywhere (and for free!). It would be great to go back one more time before the season ends.

We've been in Queenstown for a little over a month now, and we've been so busy finding an apartment and interviewing for jobs that we've had very little time for adventure. We had a bit of a "chicken or egg" situation when we first arrived, since no one wanted to rent us an apartment without proof of employment, but no one wanted to hire us until we had a local address. Fortunately we were able to submit proof of sufficient funds with a local real-estate company, and our application for an apartment in the suburb of Frankton was approved fairly quickly. We live at the top of a very steep driveway with fantastic views looking out over lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables mountain range. We're both working as zipline guides with Ziptrek EcoTours, but Steve recently accepted a second part-time job with a local Go-Kart operator and I'm training for a part-time role as a customer service agent with Air New Zealand. We're hoping that having several jobs will help us save back some of the money we spent exploring on our bikes for 4 months.

With all the interviewing, training, and working we've been on very different schedules for the last few weeks, so when we found out we were both off on Wednesday we decided to make the most of a rare opportunity and go on an adventure. One of the perks of working for Ziptrek is that we get to enjoy free tours with several local companies so that we can recommend them to our guests, so we decided to call up Roscos Milford Kayak Tour and see if we could tag along. As soon as Steve finished work on Tuesday we jumped in the car and made the six hour drive down to Milford Sound. We camped for the night at the DOC campground at Lake Gunn, and met up with our guide at the Milford Sound Lodge the next morning at 10am. We've seen a lot of rain here in Queenstown in the past few weeks, so when we woke up to a dark and rainy day we weren't too surprised.

We had a great time out on the water, despite the cold and the rain. We were outfitted in base-layers, a fleece and a waterproof jacket and given a spray skirt and kayak specific neoprene gloves. We shared a tandem sea-kayak that we steered with a pedal and rudder system, so we didn't have to coordinate our paddling to turn. Much nicer than the last time we went kayaking together, when we had an inflatable kayak with one kayak paddle and one canoe paddle, and our boat got a puncture halfway down the river. We started out with some quick safety instructions before we split up into a small group and headed out with our guide. We paddled through a fairly shallow marshy area and out to an enormous waterfall fed by a remnant glacier. From there we made our way up the fijord, paddling along the cliffs that extended all the way into the water before paddling across the open water to the other side. We stopped in the middle of the fijord to watch a seal playing in the water and warmed up with a hot drink before continuing to the other side and back down to where we started. We passed several more waterfalls on our way back to the dock that wouldn't have been there if it hadn't been raining, so there was a silver lining to the wet weather. 

We got off the water around 3pm and got back on the road to Queenstown as soon as we could to try and make as much of the scenic drive in the daylight as possible. We stopped off in Te Anau to get gas and treated ourselves to a nice dinner and made it home just after 9:30. It was really nice to get out of Queenstown for a day, but we were grateful for our nice warm bed at the end of our long adventure!

To see more pictures, check out the Photo post.