{Lake Teakapo}
We arrived in New Zealand in the wee hours of the morning. Fiona fell asleep on a bar stool while eating her breakfast. All three kids slept for the first few hours of the drive towards Mt. Cook. I took a few cat naps in spite of my best efforts to stay awake. Ryan was a champion. We all began to fully wake up by the time we reached Lake Tekapo. When Reed was younger he loved the National Geographic Documentary "Those Wonderful Dogs". He watched it with such frequency that Ryan and I are still very familiar with it's content even though it's been years since we last viewed it. It featured the bronze statue in the above photo. I'm pretty sure we were more excited about that than Reed. Lake Tekapo gets its intense milky-turquoise color from the fine rock-flour (ground by glaciers) which is suspended in the water. It was surreal to see that color in a lake. It was even more intense to see it with the Southern Alps as the back drop. ...