just the beginning..

Our adventure started in L.A. where we met up with our 34 companions for the next 3-4 months. 6 boys and 28 girls making a grand total of 34 amazing people! Our plane flight was shorter then i thought might be. We (and by we i really mean we, beacuse we synchronized the t.v. screens) watched Across the Universie together. it was an amzing movie. i love it so much. then we have breakfast at 4:30 in the morning and we landed at 6 local time in Auckland.
At the baggage claim, i came to realize that my bag was not there. so that was exciting. and by exciting i mean not so much fun. but i dealt with it, because we all ended up sharing anyways.
our first stop was Whitianga, where we swam on the beach where the second narnia "Prince Caspian" was filmed. aka Cathedral Cove. we also hiked to Mordor also known here as Tongoriro Crossing. It was an 8 hour hike but we finished it in 5 hours. Mount Doom is as ominous as it looks in the film Lord of the Rings. It was worth every step, it was probably one of my favorite days.
I love our group. we were traveling in 4 vans with trailers stuck to the back of them. the trailers have all of our luggage and more often then not, they fly open on the highway. this is interesting because my van is usually behind another van so bags start flying out and we scream and scream as ramsey (our drivier/makshift dad/one of our wonderful boys on this trip) skillfully swirvse around the bags. on one instance we probably skiddied 30 feet no lie.
i have got to say my favorite place was christchurch in the southland.
Our day at christchurch was a pretty eventful day. The night before 2 girls got hurt on the jumping pillow, stef dislocated her thumb, and janessa knocked her two front teeth out on a slide. There was a huge festival in town, we got our pictures taken and we are going to be pulbished in a book in germany, got our van towed, and got ticketed, oh and saw a guy get hit by a car. it was fun.
i love kiwi's they are the most easy going fun loving people i know! yesterday we learned to play cricket. its not like baseball at all. and we are learning to playing rugby.
marcie (my roommate, but we have our own rooms so i guess she is my housemate) just found heaps of kilts in her dresser, so one day we are going to play dress-up and roy (our host uncle) is going to teach us to play the bagpipes!! Yay for N.Z.!!!