Nearly done with NZ now

I want to thank any and all of you who are posting on our blog. Especially D.J. for all the sports updates. I just read about the Seahawks strange victory over the Cowboys. Sounds like it was wild.
We are now in Christchurch for the last 2 days of our N.Z. portion of the trip. We went down to Milford Sound and took a cruise in a downpour. At least the wind was only blowing about 40 kph, though... :( It was horrible considering what the fjord can look like on a nice day.
From there we worked our way north to Mt. Cook which is the highest mountain in the country. The afternoon we pulled in, we had 80 kph winds at the 2000' heights and 120 kph gale force winds at 3000'. Our van was in danger several times from some amazing gusts. It just poured all afternoon and early evening. We did decide to stay in the lodge instead of trying to camp since our tents may have blown away even with us in them. We were very sad as we really had had bad weather on the only other 2 mountain hikes we were hoping to do. This morning we woke up to low clouds, but no wind and some hope. Karen and I took an hour hike at about 8:00 am while the kids slept and it just kept getting better and better. We sat at an overlook watching and listening to the glaciers calve off down the mountainsides. By the time we got back got the kids geared up the sun was out in force and we had our best hike of the trip. We felt like we were in Switzerland or in the Canadian Rockies. We were ringed by 12,000' mountains with massive glaciers that were constanly calving. Once again we wish we were adding the pics now, but we will when we get to Shani's home in Old Bar. We think we have a lot of great ones. We'll let you be the judges..
Tomorrow we try to see Christchurch and get organized for the flight across the Tasman Sea the next morning.
We are all excited to get to Australia.
Keep those entries going as we love to read them.
Love, the Steens