OK, so I guess I'll be posting a little more often now. There's not too terribly much to do in these places after dark, so popping onto the computer for a few minutes is always nice.

So, Mother Nature threw a few wrenches into our plans today, beginning with some snow this morning.

At first the snow was quite magical ... we came down for breakfast and were greeted with snow-covered trees and big, fat flakes falling from the sky. The snow wasn't sticking to the roads, so we set off for the half-hour drive to Fox Glacier. We hadn't realised that we would need to go through the mountains to get there.

After some elevation gain, the roads got a little slushy, but it wasn't that bad. A car coming from the other direction flagged us down and urged us to turn around and said that she wasn't able to get through to go to work. Hmmm. She appeared to be a local, so we thought we'd listen. We went forward a little ways more looking for a place to turn around and another person stopped us and urged us to turn around.

When we got back to the hostel, we found that nearly all of the roads in the area had been closed.

We threw on a few more layers and headed over to trails around the Franz Josef Glacier (only a few kilometres from where we were staying). The trees and trails were all covered in snow and we were able to walk around the glacier's river bed and get pretty close to the terminal face of the glacier. We walked through the rainforest (yes, rainforest) an hour or two more before heading back to the hostel.

Because of the weather, the glacier hiking company was going to let us come tomorrow, but the weather was supposed to be turning worse, so we were nervous that we would once again be unable to make it through the mountains. By this afternoon the weather had warmed up and much of the snow had melted, so we decided to leave Franz Josef a day early and stay the night at Fox Glacier.

And so here I am. After arriving in the village, Becca and I headed to Matheson Lake to soak up the gorgeous views of Mount Cook and the Southern Alps. The weather seems like it will still be a bit uncooperative the next few days, so we're going to have to make the long trek to Queenstown in the middle of the day to avoid icy conditions. The weather is so unpredictable, that we aren't able to make plans more than a day or two in advance. It's a bit unnerving having our itinerary disrupted, but it's exciting to be a bit more spontaneous.

So again, we are going on a glacier hike tomorrow, I'll let you know how that goes!

PS - I've gotten much better about the whole turn-signal-on-the-right thing!