Channel Rocks

It’s hard to celebrate holidays on Gap Year and we actually made an effort this time to not travel or do anything crazy for Christmas. We found a small house in a town called Bluff in the Deep South on the coast. Our campsite was only a 50 minute drive and we couldn’t check in until 1 pm so we stopped by a community pool to swim and shower. We get a treading workout in and met an older couple from Phoenix who are HUGE Lord of the Ring Fans and traveling in New Zealand for 8 months (the third time). We talk in the hot tub for 45 minutes and cooked ourselves because the convo was too engaging.

Close to check in we hit the store for Christmas goodies (lamb, root veggies, cookies, hot chocolate, mulled wine). We agreed for Christmas we wouldn’t worry about gifts and instead go to a liquor store to get each other a drink secretly.

Our house in Bluff is a group home with three bedrooms and we hoped no one else booked the place. Made it our own in the time being and set up shop in the living room watching Love Island. They had a real fire place, but we couldn’t figure it out at first and smoke would sneak out the front so the flume was blocked or something else needed to occur.

Woke up Christmas Day and called both parents at 10am because it’s Christmas Eve at home! We open each others gifts; Kieran got 6 different beers (mostly stouts) and Mary got two bottles of wine to match her personality (one skull and another with weird little lambs trimming gas). We made hot chocolate coffee with Baileys and ate caprese sandwhiches for breakfast. Lunch was a Camabert cheese with raspberry jelly and bread

We figured out how to make the fire and enjoyed movies, reading, and video games. Roasted the lamb at 4pm and sadly at 5:15pm we hear the door open!!! We had to share our Christmas house and evening with another couple; we scrambled to clean up some messes, un-take over the living room, and get the food out the oven. Luckily, we timed the lamb to come out during a potential check-in time so we would be out of the kitchen for the rest of the evening.

Lamb and food turned out great!

They were a very nice Australian couple with the husband originally from Poland. They planned to do a great hike tomorrow so they went to bed early and woke up early. We stayed in our room and continued Love Island Australia.

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