Punakaiki and Greymouth

We woke from our beach campsite in the morning to have tea and breakfast over a fire on the beach on an overcast day. After a sluggish start, we headed back up the road to see The Pancake Rocks: a tourist attraction located on the coast of the Paparoa Naitonal Park where limestone rocks have been shaped by the ocean to look like pancakes stacked on top of one another. The most alluring part is the blowholes that occur at high tide and while we'd hoped to catch the blowholes in action, we weren't so lucky. The Pancake Rocks were still cool and I stalked a guy wearing a Boston Red Sox cap only to discover he was actually from Oklahoma. We met a couple Americans traveling on tour buses in the area and it was one of our first real experiences being in a locaition populated entirely by the tour buses passing through and people like us.

We grabbed some drinks and ice cream at the little cafe across the street and discovered that just down the road was the Paparoa Caverns. The sun came out and we scurried along in high sprits to climb around this amazing cave. We sang songs ("I Would Walk 500 Miles") and Mike took photos as we walked and crawled through sand stone and little waterfalls. We even saw a few glow worms hiding out in the back of the cavern. It was awesome.

We jumped back on the road and headed down to Greymouth: possibly the largest town on the West Coast. The boys discovered that a brewery tour was just going to start at Monteith's Brewery, so I dropped them off and went to search for internet. I was late to pick them up due to some charging electronics and boys were no where in sight when I hopped out of the car in front of the Brewery. Suddenly, I heard someone running very loudly and very fast in flip flops and realized Tim was screaming my name at the top of his lungs and sprinting full speed down a hill towards me. As he ran into me, he lifted me into the air screaming "We thought we'd lost you!"

They drank a LOT of beer on that brewery tour.

With groceries and more beer supplies in our vehicle, I drove my rowdy and joyous men to our next campsite where we had one of the best meals of our trip: nachos over a campfire. We made so much food that for the first time we legit could not finish everything. The campsite itself was awesome -- it had a stove built over the fire pit and was set off away from the other campsites -- and ... wait for it... FLUSHING TOILETS. Being set off from other sites was definitely good, as we watched Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King while we ate copious amounts of nachos around our campfire and finished the film while all laying on top of each other in our tiny tent. Epic epic night.