This weekend our school had 2 teacher meeting days so we got Friday and Monday off. For this 4 day weekend my family decided to take a road trip to the West Coast. In school we discussed the West Coast a lot. We talked about how rainy it was. I have to say I don’t think it is the rainiest place in NZ... The skies were blue everyday and getting very hot. I pictured the West Coast as more England’s weather.. I was very very wrong. The West Coast is very tropical. The plants and terrain change a great deal. It gets very humid out there. While we were in the West Coast we took a tubing trip out on a local river. Since the West Coast hadn’t had rain in 7 weeks the rivers were VERY low. It seems that us Californians bring drought with us to every river. The tubing trip was fun. They gave us a free zip line ride to make up for the lack of water. I could see the fear in my dad's eyes standing over the cliff edge. After we finished the zip line we got to sit on what was left of the water. The ride was slow but fun.

After we finished tubing we headed into a glow worm cave. The cave was very cold and long. The cave was inhabited by glow worms. The glow worms were not actually worms but maggots. They had silky strings hanging down from them to catch up insects to eat..  We learned that the worms were territorial so they would defend each's property. They also spend months as the maggot then turn into large flies. The flies only live for about 2 days max...

The next day we tried to go find an area to fish. It took us forever to find a good place. All of the rivers (if they had water in them) were stone covered and we kept getting our lines stuck in the rocks. In the end we didn’t get to catch anything. Instead we decided to skip stones. I beat my dad's record of 12 skips while I got 15!  

The next day we took a nice walk through a path alongside a river. While we were driving we came across New Zealand's largest swinging bridges. It didn't look very far though... The walk across it was great. My mom decided to walk both ways while I took a zip line on the way back. After that we did nothing except drive back to Christchurch and stop at the occasional rest area. This weekend had lots of adventures and we hope to do another road trip all the way around the south island.