Sheep Shearers and their Sheds!

We're back online again - at a local library in a very very small town. We've had quite an adventure over the last few days. We visited Lake Taupo last Saturday. Taupo summed up our longest day yet at 110 kilometers following many miles of back roads, full of rolling hills. We're learning how to be nice to each other when we're exhausted, thirsty, and hungry. We took ourselves out to an Indian restaurant, learning quickly that our local Indian food in Seattle puts Taupo's to shame. Lake Taupo is a huge lake, dwarfing Lake Washington. The next morning there were hundreds of small racing boats shooting about the lake. We spend Sunday riding around the lake and heading into the mountain ranges of central New Zealand.

Sunday we spent the day climbing up along the central mountain ranges. We had already planned on stealth camping that evening so we could make headway through the ranges the following day. But as it turns out it was our lucky day - a man took pity on us and offered us a ride over the pass. It turned out our chauffeur Simon is a sheep farmer, owning over 9,000 sheep/cows on 1400 acres of land. We ended up heading all the way back to his beautiful farm - where we spent the next day and a half roaming the farm on his 4x4 Quads, herding hundreds of sheep, and playing with his herding dogs. We spent the night in his 19th century shearing shed, sharing it with the nesting birds and little mice.