Our leisurely morning after a late night of caving was perfect but it also put us behind schedule again! We hydrated and caffienated (maybe too much) and then headed out to Waipu Caves for another round of caving. This cave was much more populated by tourists and also by glow worms! Josh had figured out some settings on his camera in order to capture better pictures. We probably spent more time than necessary but man, glow worms are freaking awesome!

We then had another epic driving day to get to our campground for the night. We had to race high tide in order to make it to Catherdral Cove before it was under water. We ran into our first semi goat-fork in that the parking area was closed and the last shuttle had just finished. As we set out to play “hey mister” in the parking lot to find a ride, the shuttle driver let us know that even though the parking lot said no parking, we could park there. His exact words were something like “there’s no bastards out this late in the day”! Still in a race with the tides, and faced with what the info boards called a 45 min walk, we jogged down in our flip flops and made the trip in just a hair over 15 mins. The beach was beautiful and the water suprisingly warm.

Our next stop was Hot Water Beach were you can dig a hole in the sand and sit in naturally hot water. It is certainly a touristy destination but due to being behind schedule, we missed the crowds and also missed the best of the hot water beach. On the bright side, we didn’t have to dig our own holes! We found the water at the bottom to be too hot to stand in comfortably. These holes were quite high on the beach and didn’t have cool water mixing in with them. They were also deeper than we are tall!