LOLKEA

It's snowing!

... but unfortunately only in Fairbanks:
The cats are well prepared with a big winter mane:
.. and I wish I was waxing my skis instead of dealing with a sunburn. Oh well.

Ben is back in Alaska and I will finally have to get some work done. There are still lots of picture from our trips - maybe I can talk him into posting some more stuff :)

Strangely disguised condom dispensers

This is very clever. To shield the children from seeing a condom dispenser in the botanical garden's bathroom, they've labeled it as a "cologne" dispenser.

Now that I think about it, maybe it really is a cologne dispenser. Which begs the question of why they would make it look like they're selling condoms? Some other intrepid investigator with $2 NZD will have to find out for sure.

Update: I found a NZ$2 gold coin and put it in the slot - and voila, this is what came out:
Looks a bit small for a condom - and it smells good too.

Fly like an eagle..

One cow says to another: "What do you think of that mad cow thing?" The other one says " What do I care? I'm a helicopter."

A helicopter in Milford Sound.

The Quest for The Gnar

After endless days of looking for The Gnar, we finally found it!
And we shredded it.In the end shredding the gnar turned out to be the easy part. The more difficult part was getting back after running out of gnar:
We crossed creeks:
fought vegetation:
climbed icy mountain faces:
slid down scree slopes:
and side-hilled tussocks:
And crossed more streams:
Another weekend of cheating "deeth" in the bag!

Penguins at last

We walked around a corner in the trail and there they were, not even 2 feet away from us: 2 yellow-eyed penguins: I even saw them projectile poop - fascinating!

And lots of sea lions doing what sea lions do on the beach:

12 spikes of 'deeth'

Another weekend of cheating 'deeth' (as they pronounce that here) - this time with crampons with 12 spikes. Each. For a total of 24. Murderous weapons on our feet.
We took a mountaineering class with the NZ Alpine Club and learned a bunch of useful things that one needs to know before heading 'to the hills' (Seems like Kiwis reserve the word 'mountains' for those things in Alaska). We learned about Enzed weather patterns and embarrassed ourselves when yelling 'south' to the question of the most avalanche-prone face of a peak. EVERYBODY knows that the sun is in the NORTH when high in the sky at noon. And then the geostrophic currents - everything is just so wrong down here. The direction you look in when entering a roundabout, the toilet doors lock by turning the dial COUNTERclockwise, the light switches are on when pushed down, ... and the toilet bowl drains the opposite way - out of the bowl. Talking about excrements: this is a picture of Toilet Gully, the perfect place for a number 2 when high up in the hills and stranded without a shovel:
And to get the bowels moving you need a hot tub, preferably a portable hot tub:
We did all kinds of things from crampon usage:
... to avalanche awareness training to self-arresting. 'Biien' is demonstrating the correct way here:

And in the end we made it to the summit of 'the hill':

And were treated to spectacular views:

It's lambing season

The knobular-knee'd little ones are out there spreading cuteness 24/7.

I can't wait to eat [another] one.