October 4 Our flight for Antarctica was scheduled for EARLY Saturday morning and our shuttle was leaving for the airport at 4:30AM. At 4:15AM we had a knock on our door telling us that the flight was canceled due to bad weather. So we slept for another couple hours and then had another full day in New Zealand ahead of us. We decided to move down the street to the Windsor B & B and then Stacy and I opted to stay in Christchurch (after all, Saturday is the day of the Art Center open air market and that means shopping J!) while Jim, Craig, Dan, and Jennifer decided to go north three hours to Kaikoura for sight-seeing and a seafood festival. Stacy and I had a lot of fun doing some Christmas shopping and enjoying the gorgeous crisp and sunny day. We bought cheese, bread, and fruit for lunch--don't ever pass a chance to eat aged gouda and goat cheese!

After lunch our plan was to spend the afternoon working, BUT, I had picked up the Art Center Theatre movie listing and we looked it over during lunch. We read the description for "As far as my feet will take me" and saw that it was only showing at 1PM, looked at each other, and packed up lunch and were on our way to the movie. We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and highly recommend it. After the movie we did work for a couple hours and then went for a long run through the Botanic Gardens. It was long because we got lost! That evening we met up with Jim, Craig, Dan, and Jennifer and exchanged stories of our day over Indian cuisine (Christchurch is a food lover's mecca). We went to sleep that night with a wake-up call for 5:45AM and high hopes for getting to Antarctica the next day. oak writes: While Stacy and Jonna shopped and went to the movie and shopped, the other 4 of us and Darrel, another refugee trying to get to the ice, headed north in a rented car. The drive was pretty, complete with green hills, rushing rivers, and (surprise) sheep. Kaikoura is a quaint town on the coast, with stunning mountains in the background, and a lovely sand beach.

Sand beach at Kaikoura. It really is sand--its just BIG sand.

The Wine and Seafood Festival is the big annual event in Kaikoura. Everyone that we talked to in Christchurch seemed to be thinking about going. Being Californians, we were expecting traffic jams and crowds, but it turned out to be a fairly mellow time. Although we had told him we were going to a wine and seafood festival, it turned out that Darrel didn't drink and didn't like seafood, but the rest of us made up for him. Between us we had seafood chowder, emu, ostrich, venison, scallops, smoked eel, smoked whitefish, fish sandwiches, scallop pie, potatoe wedges, abalone fritters (to name a few), with a sufficiency of beer and wine to wash it all down. We were replete for the drive home, which featured more sheep.