Day off? Nope. Day on.

With our week of volunteering over, Sunday was our first full free day since our arrival. So we slept in until noon and played video games all day until dinner.....JOKES! That would never happen in a place like this. Why sleep all day and then sit inside when you live smack dab in between the coast and a rainforest! So we made sure to make the best of the beautiful weather and a free day with friends.

All week long, Dave, Sam, and Kristina have been finding ways to let us experience the place we were living in. The fur seals. The hikes. The jade walks on the beach. All of these were there little ways of sharing a bit of their vast knowledge of NZ with a group of North American college kids. Sunday was no different. Dave had been dying the whole week to take us up the coast to Denniston to show us some great sites. So, at 9:30 in the morning on Sunday, he pulled into the lot and rallied the gang. No Kristina or Sam this time, just us and the Davester, and boy what a tour-guide.

We drove north in the CVNZ caravan as Dave rattled off fact by fact as we passed sites, towns, and strange vegetation. Honestly, the man knows so much about NZ, it's amazing. He first took us up to the old Denniston coal site. It is a place for visitors now, with info panels displaying the history of the place. The old coal site was not only the place where the coal was extracted, but also the place where the coal workers and families lived. The interesting thing about it though, is that the coal site was built atop, well, practically a mountain! The track the coal ran on was this enormous vertical drop down towards the coast. The weight of the cars full of coal going down, would pull the empty cars at the bottom back up to be filled again. However, this was the only way up and down! The road that we drove up yesterday wasn't there at that time, so there was a real sense of confinement in that tiny coal village. If you wanted to go down, you rode the coal cars. What a way to travel. "Here, go plummet to the bottom on this seatbelt-less large wagon!" Um...no thanks.

After our pit stop there and our realization that we are pretty darn lucky to ride in vehicles with brakes, we headed to our real destination for the day, a trail just north of Denniston running next to Charming Creek. It was an hour tramp but was awesome. The trail was actually an old coal track, so we were actually walking in the tracks, still intact after all these years. To our left for most of the track was Charming Creek, beautifully running, the sound of its rushing water as soothing as anything. We tramped over rocks and over bridges, through caves and into caverns. When we were an hour in and chuck full of knowledge from Dave, he led us down a tiny path in the trees to a small stream, where we sat and ate our lunch. It was fantastic.

The walk back was quicker, as with any trail, but just as great as our tramp out. The highlight of it for me was when I got to have my Indiana Jones moment at one of the bridges. It was a wobbly one, held up only by cables, but even though they weren't ropes like IJ tended to find, I chalked it up the entire time I walked to make myself feel like a professor turned artifact finder. What can I say, Indi and I...are pals. He taught me everything I know.