After just a few hours sleep, our family (of only 7 now!) packed up, said goodbye to Sarah and made our way out to the bus. It was such a weird feeling, getting on and not knowing more than half the people! We were definitely much more subdued than usual and were really missing the rest of our 'family'. It was hilarious to see Seagull again though as we hadn't seen him since our crazy night out. One of his first questions on the microphone was to ask who was responsible for nearly breaking one of his ribs? Of course, I got the blame! As the journey went on, we got chatting to a few of the 'new' people and slowly began to integrate again! We hadn't gone far when one of the new girls made herself known to everyone by being sick all over herself and her sister! It turns out they had a pretty crazy night out in Queenstown the night before so she was suffering and had been caught off guard! The poor girl was so embarrassed and her sister was not impressed!
 
We travelled over the Lindis Pass and through the MacKenzie country to Lake Pukaki . We stopped to take some photos of the lake but it was ridiculously windy: Seagull said it was around 150km/hour!!! People were getting blown over, hats were being blown off and the bus was rocking. It was a pretty scary moment as I don't think I've ever experienced winds that strong before but it was very funny watching everyone get blown about! The main reason we stopped to look at the lake was because it is the country's largest hydroelectric lake, now I know that doesn't seem very exciting but as a result of it being dammed off to produce electricity, all the water in the lake has turned an amazing light misty blue colour because of all the rock powder that is washed into the lake from the surrounding mountains. It really was very pretty!
 
From there we headed north to Mount Cook. At 3754m, Mount Cook is the highest of New Zealand's 23 mountains over 3000m. The area was designated a National Park in 1953 and includes 22 peaks over 3000m with glaciers covering 40% of the park. It is named after Captain James Cook. This area houses the Sir Edmund Hilary Alpine Centre as he did a lot of training on this mountain range before tackling Everest! In case you don't know, Hilary and Tenzing Norgay were the first people to ever climb Everest back in 1953 .
 
Sadly for us, it was a foggy day and it was pouring with rain so we only caught the smallest of glimpses of the mountain and weren't able to do any of the walks because of the wind. So our afternoon was spent relaxing in the hostel watching films, writing postcards and chatting to the new group members. Unbelievably, it turned out that some of them had actually been in Winnie's on the night we did the bar crawl in Queenstown and remembered Matt, Ella & Roman doing their dance routine on the stage as they were the people that actually joined in and they got to see Seagull getting naked!! Like most Stray passengers, they had heard of Seagull before but, as they have never seen him, they had no clue it was him exposing himself in front of them. In the evening, our ever decreasing group cooked dinner together then headed to bed for a rare early night! We say early night but it still ended up midnight by the time everyone stopped chatting and being silly. 
 
Based on the photos and postcards we saw of Mount Cook, it really is a beautiful and impressive area, it's just a shame we missed out because of the weather. Maybe we'll get to see it next time eh?!