Whakapapa

A weekend out of the city is always a fun adventure down under. Erin, myself, and Jochen (German friend) headed south around 3pm on Friday. We had about a 4 hour drive ahead of us and we wanted to ensure we beat the traffic out of the city, so we got out of work a little early. We played the alphabet game as well as a few other car games to pass the time.

We arrived in National Park and headed to "hire" skis and then hit the bar for some food and drinks. There were about 10 others from my work that were coming down for the weekend as well and they trickled into the bar during the night.

Saturday we headed to ski on an active volcano called Mt. Ruapehu (Whakapapa). It was an amazing sight and not having any trees on the mountain was pretty amazing. The conditions were good in the morning, but after about an hour, the snow started and visibility on the mountain became very bad (about 2 meters if you were lucky). We skied for 1/2 day and then all 2-wheel vehicles had to leave the mountain so we headed back down to where we were staying and headed to the bar. We did get a percentage of our lift ticket costs back, which was pretty good.

Sunday morning was more of the same, and we didn't even attempt to ski. The upper mountain didn't even open until after 10am, and even then, visibility was still pretty poor. On the way home, we stopped for a "coffee break", hit the driving range, and then got some burgers at Burger Wisconsin. We also found out why they are called Hamburgers when there is no Ham in them. (Charlie Nagreen named his creation after the Hamburg ground beef favoured by German immigrants in his hometown of Hortonville.)

So we are back in Auckland now, and we had a great time away, although we were only able to do limited skiing. Check out the pictures from our weekend here.