Hello All! I have been quite busy over the last two and a half weeks with all the adventures I could possibly imagine in New Zealand. To kick off my break I went to the Bay of Island with about 25 other study abroad students. Bay of Islands is up north about 3 hours from Auckland and as you can imagine from the name is really great when it is sunny but right from the start we had lots of rain. We made the best of it of course!
I got bored in the car so I french braided everyone's hair in the car!
Since we had extra time with the rain we stopped at some famous bathrooms. You may think it's a bit odd that we stopped in a tiny town just for the bathrooms but they are so awesome!! The whole place was mosaics.
All sorts of tiles were used, even old glass bottles!
Since there were so many friends staying together we decided to rent two houses in town. Here you can see the family room and kitchen of the house I was in. They were both extremely nice and was fun to be able to relax on a couch and invite friends over for a real bbq!
Well I sorta signed up for a sky dive, ahh! Originally we signed up for Friday afternoon but because of the rain we couldn't go and then Saturday morning got a phone call that we might be able to do it. Since there were 18 of us wanting to sky dive we were suppose to go in groups of 6 and luckily I got to go in the first group. When we got there they told us to fill out the forms saying we were okay with possible death and other terrifying things like that then were sent off and were told that we would get a phone call when we could jump.
So the six of us headed to the chocolate factory and drooled over the expensive yummy chocolate!
We then went to the Rainbow Falls and actually got to see a rainbow! It was a huge beautiful waterfall with a really quick nice walk. After this we thought it looked sunny enough so headed over to the airport. We proceeded to wait for probably 4 or 5 hours and watch other people jump but when it got to our turn it became really cloudy. Sadly, we didn't get to jump but scheduled to do it after our sailing trip Sunday night.
Sunday we got up early and went out on a huge sailboat, it was mostly just the 25 study abroad students which made it quite fun. These are just some of the island we got to see.
This is our huge sailboat just as the sun finally came out! Luckily it was early enough in the day that it got sunny so we got to enjoy a relaxing day.
We stopped on one of the islands and hiked up to the top. We hiked barefoot so got nice and muddy, I loved it. The view at the top was just perfect, don't you agree?!
After swimming around for a while we went back to the boat to jump off the front of it. (We thought we would practice jumping for our sky dive haha). As we got back into town there was a call from the sky dive place telling us to run over quick since it's a beautiful day. So I went in a bathing suit and had to borrow sneakers!
But...Here it is the crazy sky dive!! I did a 16,000 ft sky dive, it took about 30 min to get up that high but the view was just amazing.
After I think 12,000 ft we had to put on oxygen masks!
Here I am just about to go out! As my legs flew out the door I became totally terrified and then we quickly were falling. I screamed at the top of my lungs then realized it wasn't scary it was just really fun! I had 70 seconds of free fall then about 5 min with the parachute.
Here I am free falling!
Here I am spinning us around with the parachute. This was really nice since it was just quiet and just peaceful.
So this was the beginning of my break, a beautiful house, sailing trip, and sky dive! I have finals right now so it might take me a while to tell you all about my south island trip. But a little teaser is I jumped again and had a fantastic time!
Love,
Michele
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