New Adventure!

Hello everyone! I am actually really excited to write in this blog this week because I have so much to tell! I will start by saying that overall, I had a pretty fun holiday break from school. It was nice to be able to go to the ocean everyday and have beautiful weather. I was also able to help my host mum in the café when she needed me (which keeps me on my toes!). I didn’t really get to see many of my mates over the holidays but I still enjoyed myself!
Ok! I will now break my news! On Sunday night, my host mum and dad took my host sister Shelly and her son Greg back to the airport. Meanwhile, I stayed back and helped finish some of the work in the café. After work, I went up to my host brother Chris’s house where I found him in terrible pain. He had been working on his retaining wall and been working with wire when the wire snapped back and hit his hand. His had now has mussels out of place and bones shattered (not good). However, he was still in a good mood and wanted to take the dog for a walk. So Chris, his fiancée Tracey, and I headed down to the beach to walk the dog. We got about halfway along the beach when I spotted some fins in the water. We got closer and we noticed there were about 8-10 dolphins in the water. We all sat there and stared at them and I told my host brother, “Man I wish I had shorts on so I could go swimming out there!” He then told me to just jump in there anyways. I thought about it for a minute and then stripped down into my boxers and ran out there! (Sorry I didn’t rate this blog PG or R haha). The dolphins were only 15-20 meters from shore so they were easily within swimming distance. I managed to get out far enough to them but they just kept swimming up and down the beach. Eventually, they decided to come towards me. Before I knew it, I had 4-6 dolphins swimming right around me! I was able to reach out and touch them! It was an amazing experience to actually swim with dolphins in the wild. However, because these dolphins aren’t trained to be around people, you cannot ride them like you can at Sea World (haha). It was still so amazing to be that close to them in the wild and be able to touch them.
Besides my dolphin encounter, I haven’t been up to a lot besides school. School started again on Monday and everything is back to normal. We only have about 4 ½ weeks of school left and then we are done. That will give me lots of time to travel and see more of New Zealand. I have attached some pictures of the dolphins and I at the bottom. However, they were taking by my brother with my camera phone so they aren’t as close but I hope you can still get the picture! Thanks for reading!

Almost got em'! Quite a ways out yet




















All tired out from swimming (haha)