Day 4 - Franz Josef Glacier

 Franz Josef is a nice little place - much smaller and quieter than Queenstown, with a main street with the Southern Alps in the background that looks just like this...

First up this morning was a bunch of small walks to check out the glacier.  We're determined to do a minimum of 10,000 steps a day and these knocked off a solid 9,000.

Here's some of the sights....

Road to the start of a series of short walks, including one to view the glacier terminal face, one to the Peter's Pool for a cool reflection of the glacier terminal face and one to another excellent suspension bridge (a personal favourite 😄) that had nothing to do with the glacier terminal face!

First walk to view the glacier TF...

Penny Price visits Peter's Pool to see the reflection of the glacier TF

and a suspension bridge minus kiddies, they went a different way that they thought was shorter and they were right, but we got to muck around on the bridge - win win.

After our walks the boys had a round of frisbee golf and M and I nipped over to Okarito on the coast, where we saw this....

and this...

all in all frisbee golf was probably the better choice 😖

And after all the walking, plus the excitement of Queenstown over the last couple of days were were all a bit knackered and crashed BUT like troopers we rallied in the afternoon for a spot of made up games catching bottle tops (as you do!).  Interesting to see the different demeanours mid-game.  Jeremy cool.  Emily calm.  Daniel a stress head from stress head's ville.  Not sure if you can tell this from the photos below...

And then there was this... no words....

And finally we got a sneaky visit from some NZ wildlife....

Right now Steve is attempting to teach the kids Euchre.  It's not going well.  Also makes me realise our family contains only Chiefs, not an Indian in sight.  Makes for some very robust conversation 😄

We are vaguely contemplating searching for glow worms later on but it doesn't get dark here until about 9:30pm so it would be waaaaay past my bedtime. Jury is still out on this one....