Hi everyone,

Thank you all for John's birthday wishes, much appreciated.

Mo - I will be more than happy to advise you on your trip to NZ for next year. We will have to have a get-together when we get back.

Sarah - thanks for your message, and also Nick & Jan. Rachel - hope the bump is doing well. You must be getting quite big by now!

David - good news about the car. Glad that you didn't have to pay out any more money! Everyone else - thanks for all your messages. It's lovely to hear from you.

We drove to Greymouth from Nelson but we didn't do much while we were there. Our camp site was right on the beach so we went for a moonlight walk and the water was still incredibly warm. Left there and travelled on to Hokitika where the greenstone was first found. Quite a touristy little place but we did buy some souvenirs whilst there.

We found a lovely stop for coffee right by the Buller river where we watched some people being taught kayakking. The weather was and has been just perfect.

We are now at Franz Josef and have done a trip to Lake Matheson, which is called the mirror lake. When it's still it reflects all the mountains round about and it's lovely. We then did the biggie - a flight over Franz Josef Glacier and Fox by helicopter and spent 10 minutes fooling around on the ice, falling over, etc. It was fantastic and we have lovely photos to prove it. We are struggling with uploading the photos at the moment, so don't know whether you will be able to see them in this session.

We also walked to the foot of the glacier which is retreating at an alarming rate. Who knows, in a few more years it may virtually disappear, probably because of global warming.

We have a long journey tomorrow, moving on down to Queenstown. We have three nights there in apartments, so we will blog again from there. It will be nice just to chill out for a while but no doubt we will be tempted with jet boats, gondola rides, luge, bungi jumping etc.!

That's all for now folks and we will try these pictures.

Love to all

from The Whirlybirds.

P.S. Glad to know that mum is much better now. I keep sending her postcards.