Break-down Tour 05

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David, Marc, Monica, Megan and I decided to go on a Road Trip that was supposed to end up at Cattle Creek, where Malcom and Denise, the people I am living with, have a cottage.
We started our journey in Dunedin, and made our way to the Moeraki Boulders.

The famous Moeraki boulders lie scattered along a beach 40 kilometres south of Oamaru. According to Maori legend, the boulders are gourds washed from the great voyaging canoe Araiteuru when it was wrecked upon landfall in New Zealand some 1000 years ago.

Scientists explain the boulders as septarian concretions formed about 65 million years ago. Crystallization of calcium and carbonates around charged particles in muddy undersea sediments gradually formed the boulders in a process taking as long as four million years. The soft mudstone containing the boulders was raised from the seabed around 15 million years ago and sea erosion is exposing the erosion-resistant boulders.

when we got to the beach we were kind of dissapointed, that it was high tide, so the boulders were mostly in the water. But as it turned out this made it even more fun to try to jump on the boulders without getting wet. Especially the guys went of playing around.

On our further way my car wasn't doing to good. Fortunately we made it through one of our "shortcuts" which turned out to be a really crapy road with tight corners (yes, I learned that you don't say curves!). It was sooo foggy when we drove through this valley, but every once in a while you could see a little bit of the beautiful country around you. Not long after we got out of there my car sounded worse and worse, and I couldn't excellerate anymore, so I decided to pull into a driveway. I thought that was a good idea since we were in the middle of nowhere and since it would be easier to tell the AA (ADAC) where we were. So I turned of the car and that was the last sound that we heared of it. It wouldn't start anymore. So here we were, in the middle of nowhere, 5 people in the car, one dog... Ruby was sitting on Daves lap, looking out of the open window when I thought, that I might be better of rolling the window up again because she had that "I want to chase a rabitt" - expression on her little doggy face. Still in the process of thinking so I saw something flying by me and jumping out of my window. She was gone! You shoud have seen us, like in a bad comedy all of us jumped out of the car and ran after Ruby, trying to get her... She was of course way faster than us since she chased the rabbit through the bush. It was hilarious! Finally I jumped and managed to grab her leg.

We ended up waiting for 2 hours for the AA to arrive. He towed us to the next bigger city where we had to leave the car and Daves dad picked us up (we were lucky that he had a van since we were 5 people! I don't think that there were still busses leaving so otherwise we would have been stuck)

When we arrived back in Dunedin we made us tea and just hung out at Monicas place, Ruby just crashed under the table and wasn't seen anymore till Monica allowed her to crash on her lap (even though Monica doesn't like small dogs, but Ruby convinced her that she is the most gorgeous dog in the world :-)

Boy was I glad that I had joined the AA 2 days before the breakdown happened!...

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Photos

Monica and Ruby
Ruby manages to melt everyones heart

boulder-dance
unfortunately we got there at high tide...