This is the hotel cat:

Lumpy wasn't around when the cat was, leading to speculation that he was actually transformed into the hotel cat.

This morning's car extraction was aided by the dude at the hotel, whose directing was good enough for us to contemplate asking if we could just take him with us to help park at the rest of the places we needed to deal with this beast of a Warthog on this trip.

Guru G rang the Cadbury Factory not long after breakfast and got to leave a message on the answering machine, which prompted a booking for no-name for a party of 6, at 10:30am. This meant that some grocery shopping could be done in Dunedin, in an attempt to avoid having to buy grocery things in Queenstown. We were waved through the pay carpark at the New World Supermarket near the Cadbury factory, which worried us a bit, but come on, a large Ford Transit of a Warthog and 6 people walking out is fairly hard to miss.

Grocery shopping aside, we walked over to the Cadbury Factory and began our tour... we watched chocolate being dropped onto sheets, wrapped up, and boxed up. We got some chocolate as part of the tour, and we bought some chocolate things, and non-chocolate but somehow related things, in the shop thingy at the end of the tour.

After the chocolate related shopping, Decay and Lumpy and I were leaning outside the entrance to the Factory Tour Reception, a couple of Austrian/German/Dutch/? touristy girls asked us whether we thought the Cadbury Factory Tour was something worth doing. We nodded, and Decay mentioned that Grumbler was on perhaps the wrong tour for the factory ... *grin*

Upon leaving the car park for the supermarket, we discovered that we'd stayed over the 90 minutes of free parking, and shock of shocks we'd have to pay a fine ... of $3.00. We drove out of Dunedin, and headed somewhere. Lunch ended up in Lawrence, where Gary the esky/chillie-bin served us well. We did find it kind of weird that the women on the other bench drove off and left the guy at the picnic table ... they did all arrive together ... we decided not to stop in for a coffee at the Wild Walnut, not sure if that was because the signwriting was in some sort of bright green jungle motif, or some other reason...

Alexandra wasn't really our next stop, but we did stop at a hydro-electric dam outside a place starting with R, and also some BIG fruit at Cromwell. We're so easily amused by giant things, aren't we? There are pictures of us standing/sitting infront of a big apple, apricot, peach, and pear. We passed the location of one of the bungy jumping places, and lots and lots of sheep. The sheep here seem to get quite adventurous in their locations. G didn't particularly find the Remarkables particularly remarkable... at least not as remarkable as she'd been led to believe in any case. We found our hotel, checked in, asked if there was a Chinese Restaurant worth visiting, to which the Korean receptionist person said ... well there are a couple, let me find them in the guide for you ...

A Gondola-ing we went next, and G made it to the top! She did look quite petrified though, getting out of the gondola, but the fun part came next... Luge! We all ended up with 5 luge trips,and a gondola trip. The luge was much fun, G enjoyed it, Decay hooned down the advanced track, Lumpy kept on going on about the Gondoliers, M34tb4LL filmed some of the action while he wasn't luge-ing, and Droidy tried not to crash. There was some souvenir shopping, and then some dinner action. Mexican was the final decision for the night - not that I don't trust the Chinese food, but ... I don't trust the Chinese food. Lumpy approved muchly of the Mexican food, which, being 10pm on a Wednesday night, was pretty good (: