Dec 27 - After packing up our hostel room and making sure not to leave any rubbish in the bin (that would incur a $10 fee! Shock shock horror!) we were on our way again in the pouring rain. I'm getting a bit forgetful now of our route. We tried to see Franz Josef Glacier...I got exactly two pictures - one of something white that could possibly be part of a glacier in the distance, and another of a sign telling us to keep out and detailing how dangerous it is, how tourists had died there trying to get a closer look, etc. On the 20 minute round trip from the car to the entrance of where the glacier is and back, we got positively soaked. I feel like today was the day we were meant to go to the glow worm caves but no...something is wrong! I'm totally missing a day. Whatever, I'm sure no one cares!! So with our clothes sopping, we got back in the car and started north. Destination: Charleston to do glow worm rafting through caves. It was only supposed to be a 3-4 hour drive. We left at 9 am and had glow worm tour at 2 pm. it was all going according to plan...we were almost in Greymouth, which is the large-ish town right before Charleston...and then it all went through the window. The rain was beginning to subside a bit, but with less than an hour left to our destination...Paroa happened. Paroa is a town right before Greymouth. As we drove along, we noticed large amounts of flooding at the sides of the road. Some of the side roads were completely submerged. People were kayaking past a half drowned play structure. Then there was the large line up of cars, clearly stopped for a reason...yes, yes, the road had totally flooded. This led to a crazy adventure (9 hours of driving in total for the day) in which we tried to get around the flooding. Guess what? The flooding was happening EVERYWHERE. Don't tell the car rental company, but we took some pretty iffy roads through forests and splashed through a couple of puddles that were, well, bigger than your average puddle. It quickly became evident that we were NOT going to make it to glow worms, but there was no mobile reception to call. Slight worry, but what can you do? So...5 hours of crazy backroads later, and after seeing quite a few tiny NZ towns we were never planning to see (Blackball, anyone? Apparently famous for their salami factory, which J was extremely excited to see...sadly it was closed) we made it to stupid Greymouth. Now we had to stay the night in the area so we could do glow worms the next day instead of going to the awesome hot springs campsite that Jeremy found (the road that way was flooded too, so we couldn't have gone even if we had been able to). We made the mistake of driving the extra hour or so up to Westport. If you ever go to NZ - believe me, you can skip this one. Westport was kinda flood-y too, and we couldn't camp, so we stayed at another hostel called Bazil's. At least there were some cute cats there. Totally exhausted after our huge day in the car, with no glacier, no glow worms, and no salami factory, we collapsed into our (separate) beds and set the alarm to be up early for damn glow worms!!!