Today Sarah turned a lovely twenty-seven years of age. Her first birthday as my wife! What a milestone!

When we woke up, we were glad to see that the skies were clear and sunny. We decided to head towards Fox Glacier which is only about 20km South of Franz Josef, but the road between the two is very windy and hilly. At first the climbs were nice and gradual and we were surrounded by forested mountains and clear streams, so we were happy.

Soon things became very steep though. If you look closely, you can see Sarah has her “Lance” face on as she destroys this switchback.

We arrived in Fox Glacier about two hours later and decided to spend the night here so we would have time to see the glacier and walk some of the trails in the area. We stopped at the DoC office to get some information on the trails and it looks like I was right, a lot of tourists have been injured and killed because they don’t heed the warning signs near the glaciers! Think twice before crossing that barrier kids!

Fox Glacier is smaller and much less touristed than Franz Josef, but we thought it was more spectacular. It has carved out a narrow canyon with vertical walls and the trail follows the icy river right up to the terminal face of the glacier.

The ice in the river looked like the tapioca balls in bubble tea.

Ye olde terminal face of Fox Glacier.

It started to rain on us (gasp!), so we headed back to the township of Fox Glacier. We thought about going out for a nice dinner, but after looking around at our options decided we would have tea and cake instead and wait until we returned to Auckland in about a month for a celebratory dinner. After our snack, Sarah got to forget about the budget for a day and go on a shopping spree at the market here in town. She picked out “Luxury Muesli”, a nice bottle of NZ Shiraz, some of her favorite digestive biscuits, and “all the milk she could drink.” Not pictured is the ice cream bar that was devoured before the photo was taken.

While waiting for Sarah to pick out her loot, I found the perfect treat for our little kitty Robo. I bet he wishes they had this in the United States!

No comment on these puzzling little treats though.

Tomorrow we will continue South towards our first real mountain pass. Haast Pass!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.