I am boring. Today all I have to report is that I got my delivery from the CSA this morning and it was awesome. Contents included: 4 banana peppers, two big tomatos, a basket of cherry tomatos, 4 plum tomatos, two zucchini, scallions, two peaches, a cantelope, 4 plums, an eggplant, a bag of some unidentifable green vegetables that look like mini zuchinis, a green pepper... I think that's it. A pretty good load, all things considering. No squash, suprisingly, guess I'll have to cut back on all the squash soup I'm intending on making.

So, realizing I never really did a trip report from my 6 weeks in Australia and New Zealand, leaving you instead to puruse pictures, I thought I'd tell a story that came to mind as my screen saver cycled through pictures.

We spent several days on the southern most part of the southern island - a region called the Caitlins. Its a litte bit off the beaten tourist track of New Zealand. The "tourist road" usually involves Mount Cook, then Queenstown, then onto Mitre Sound without ever going to the south end of the island.

I wouldn't have missed this three day road trip through the Caitlins for the world. We spent each day stopping at random coastal sites - caves, lighthouses, sea birds, dolphins and sea lions dominated the trip....

Which brings us to the sea lions.

We stayed at an incredible little backpackers lodge in a little town called Surat Bay, right on the beach. New Zealand hostels might have been a little pricey ($30 pp for a night), but they can barely be called backpackers, as they are cozy, well-kept, privately owned and we almost always had our own room.

Yes, this was outside our back door.

Karen and Emily were getting along fine... We made Emily an unofficial member of the AE Female Mafia in Sarah's absense. Emily is so nice. So this makes Karen mean. Take note future students of Prof. Karen:

This particular backpackers had its own hoard of Hooker Sea Lions.

So we set off down the beach to go to a place called "Cannibal Cove". The beach was lovely. And there were sea lions a playing.

Then we got to the cove, where there was one really large, really lazy bull. Looks harmless, right?

We got close - still following the rule of never get between a sea lion and the water.

The bull still was pretty darn angry at me for taking its picture (yes, I got closer to it than I should have)

It started barking at me and looked like it was about to charge.

I scrambled up a rock, when little Emily used all her vet-in-training skills to make herself real big and barked back at the sea lion, yelling "Hey Hey Hey!!".

Thus I was saved from being mauled by a sea lion.

More pictures of beautiful cliffs, windswept beaches, rocks and lighthouses here