The Scenic South Island

So we're on the south island now, actually we flew in last nite and are in Seattle but I'm gonna retain a present tense anyway. Our ferry got in and we started driving. Our plan was to go up to the North tip of the island then down the west coast and around the bottom and up the east to finish two weeks later in Christchurch.
Right when our ferry got in Mandy started feeling sick so we drove a few hours to a nice town on the coast called Nelson. She was pretty much confined to the bed for the next 48 hours and we stayed in Nelson for 2 nites waiting for her to get better. We just took it easy and hung out for a few days, on the third day she was feeling better and we decided to shove off. We decided not to go up to Abel Tasman because the weather was bad and we had lost a day; we did after all have a whole island to drive around. We drove from the west coast to the east coast and stayed in a town called Westport. The next day was our 3 year anniversary so we decided to splurge and stayed the nite in a real parking lot! It was at a hostel in a place called Greymouth. On the drive down from Westport we stopped at a few really cool spots. One was a trail to a seal colony and we watched them playing on the rocks for a while and then we went to pancake rocks. Basically there are layered rocks coming out of the ocean that look like a stacks of pancakes, we didnt get to stay to long because it was pouring out so we jumped back in the car and dreamed of various other forms of giant breakfast foods the rest of the way to Greymouth. We took much needed showers, the water was actually heated by coal, and joined the rest of the guests for the only viable rainy day activity, Brewery Tour. It was 25 dollars for a tour, tasting, dinner and they even opened the bar for 30 min. We had a great time and made lots of friends from England.
The next day we headed farther south and spent the next two nites at Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers. We went on a guided tour of Franz Joseph and hiked around on the glacier for 3 hours. This was probably thee highlight of the south island. To quickly recap the tour theres a short walk through rain forest, a medium walk along the river that comes out of a cave in the glacier and runs through a rocky valley floor surrounded on both sides by near vertical cliffs absolutely littered with waterfalls. This brought us to the base of the glacier where we strapped on our crampons (huge spikes for your boots) and went to play on the very large ice cube. We couldn't have asked for a nicer day, the sun was shining and we were hiking around in shorts and t's. There were little streams coming off the glacier and we even crawled through a few ice tunnels. To add to the already unreal environment giant green alpine parrots kept landing on the ice around us to investigate. That nite we camped at the parking lot to the other ice cube, Fox Glacier. We cooked dinner while enjoying quite a view, two parrots even supervised our cooking and took food right out of our hands when they weren't trying to steal our whole meal.
The next day we hiked around Lake Matheson, the most photographed lake in NZ. It is set in the foreground of Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman and if the water is calm enough the mountains are perfectly reflected in the water. Then we went to Gillepsies beach for a few hours. It had a black sand beach, was covered in flat round stones, and even had a pair of sheep wandering around on it (those things are seriously everywhere). At around 3 we put 100 dollars in our gas tank and made the 7 hour drive to Queenstown, my favorite city! The drive was through the Otago region, and even though i know ive said it a hundred times, it was the most scenic drive yet.