MOO!!

Hello to all my lovely family and friends!! Those of you that are still reading this are very loyalJ It is hard to believe that I have already been gone for 8 months!! Time has really flown by! It is getting very cold here…it is not even winter yet here and it is colder than the coldest day in California…we Californians are such wimps!!! I am jealous that all of you are just coming into summer now! I was thinking of switching hemispheres to be warm but I love NZ so much, I am not ready to leave yet!!

I have been working on the dairy farm for the last month or so and I absolutely love it! It is a very long day working on a diary farm. We start work every morning at 4 AM to milk the cows, which takes about 4 hours, then get an hour long breakfast break, then work from 10 till about 1:30, then milk the cows again at 3 and finish around 5PM! Although it is long, it is so nice working outside all day, watching the sunrise/sunset every day… I really like the people I work with and the work is really fun. I thought I would hate it because of the early mornings (we all know im not a morning person!) but the few hours before the sunrise is just suuuuch a beautiful part of the day…one I never would have seen without working there!

During my time on the farm, I took a week and went hiking in the Mt. Cook National Park…it was AMAZING, the best hiking I have ever done! All the mountains in the area are covered with snow so when I got to the tops, I was hiking in snow! It was so beautiful and I was blessed with wonderful weather the whole time! I have a friend who works there so I was able to stay with her…it was great because I went hiking all day while she was working and then got to hang out with her when she was off at night! I also got to go on a boat ride up to a lake that was formed by glacier melt...so got to touch lots of iceburgs and got up to the glacier...it was very cool!

Although I love it so much, it is time for me to move on because it is getting really cold and the cows do not get milked in the winter so there is not much work on the farm anymore. Besides, I think I might be too much of a wimp to work outside here in the winter! I decided this last week when I was working with the cows outside and it started snowing on me! I am thinking of working here again at the end of winter/early spring…but we will see!

Now I am going to go on a 2-3 week trip visiting some friends around the country and then will come back down the bottom of the south island again (really love it down here) and I think I will work in a pub, where I can escape the cold! it is already snowing there!aahhhhh I hope I can handle it!

How are you? I would like to know!!! Miss you :)

the photos are just some of the farm i worked on, me with the cows, the milking shed and my mt. cook trip!