Freddie Freeloader

This is going to be in English because it's a lot easier for me at the moment to both write and think in English.

We've had a crappy - well not crappy, we enjoyed it anyways - day. We're currently in Franz Josef for 2 nights. For those of you who don't know what Franz is, no need to worry, we didn't know before getting here either!

Franz is like a national park with a sort of glacier-filled-valley on which you could do guided hikes and everything.

We got here yesterday after some intense travelling. We've actually, almost every stop since last I wrote, only stayed one night in each place. It's harsh because you don't really get to relax the way you're supposed to on a vacation, but you get to see so much (even if we're almost constantly sleeping in the bus..)! We've stopped at small random places like River Valley where I got a massage to bigger cities such as Nelson where we had a party and coastal towns such as Westport just to relax.

But as of now, we're in Franz Josef! And it would be an even more awesome experience if the weather had been better. We arrived yesterday on Christmas Day and was prebooked-ish to go on a full day glacier hike today - on Sandra's birthday - but the office was closed so we could neither confirm our booking or pay anything. Which we're quite happy for today.

Back to yesterday though! As it was the 25th of December and the celebration of Christmas in (odd) countries such as this we had paid ourselves a treat to eat the "all-you-can-eat" Christmas-dinner-special-buffet for 39,50$ (almost 200 SEK). We first had a glass of bubbly to celebrate and then we stuffed ourselves full with food such as: roast ham, roast chicken, roast beef, roast veggies, coleslaw, mashed potatoes, pasta-salad, stuffing, bread, gravy and hummus. MAN, was that good or what..?! Then we had dessert as well... PHEW! We shared a bottle of wine for dinner as well - just because it was Christmas! Need I point out that I was quite full when I got to bed..? Then we had the secret-santa-give-away where those who wanted were supposed to buy random gifts for a price of 10$-total to give away to a random person! I bought three tacky Christmas-ties but as something went wrong I didn't get a present. I didn't care though - as everyone thought that I should have - it was Christmas and I felt like giving! We stayed up playing games afterward and then we got to bed quite early because we knew we were supposed to have a long day in front of us.

When we got up this morning at 7:00 we looked out the window to meet with POURING rain. REALLY POURING rain. So we all decided to skip the full-day hike and sleep-in and try to downgrade it to a half-day hike if the weather went better. We slept a little longer and went to see the booking office. We asked about the weather and they all said it would be pouring the entire day - and for the coming week. So Alain, a Canadian, told us about a bus that took us up there and back for a small charge of 12$ (instead of a full-day hike for 140$..). So we decided to try that. We got some cake and presents for Sandra and headed back to surprise her - and she was! We had ice cream-cake and cooked berries. Excellent! We did the dishes and chilled out in the room to wait for the weather to get better. It didn't so we decided to go the hot-water-spa-pool in the pouring rain instead. It was awesome! We had some cold coke, warm water and a chilly downpour. It was perfect. Got up, ate lunch and now we're practically just waiting for dinner-time. We're going to eat out just to be fancy on Sandra's big day!

AND! I FINALLY got my thumb out of my arse and wrote an ad on Gumtree.com! Hopefully someone's going to reply!

Fred pa jorden och karlek till er alla!