Oh what fun it is to run down a sand dune!

Saturday morning began with a speedy walk to the Unipol (the university gym) for a ride to my Kiln Fired Glass class at Momona Studio, near the Dunedin Airport. Our instructor, Lorna, introduced us to many methods of making glass including fusing and slumping and we made pieces with leaves, wire, confetti glass, and enamel. I made a few tiles and a few plates. They are all being fired this week so I hope they come out looking nice.

On our way to the peninsula

After arriving home at around 2:45PM, I made myself some lunch, which was left over curry and headed over to flat 5 to watch a few episodes of Entourage with Fredric and Tucker. Fredric then drove us, and one of his friends from school to Sandfly Beach which is on the Otago peninsula. We went right around sun down and the beach was beautiful. To get to the beach we had to go down a very steep sand dune, which was incredibly fun to run down, but climbing up in the dark three or four hours later was rather tiring. 

On the beach we saw many sea lions, as can be seen in a previous post. We also saw two yellow eyed penguins. Actually, because of the yellow eye penguins, I almost stepped on a sea lion. I spotted a penguin and pointed it out to Tucker who then decided to go climb the rocky/grassy hill to get a closer look at them. I followed him thinking that it'd be fun to climb the hill too. To get to the hill we had to cross a bunch of rocks and as the rocks were wet I was looking for nice big ones that wouldn't move so I would not slip. As I went to step on a large brown rock I thought, "Hmm, that rock over there has quite a lot of fur" and then suddenly I realized it was actually a sleeping sea lion. I decided not to go any farther because I thought if I woke it up and it saw that I was only about two feet away from it, it would lurch at me and I would have nowhere to run as I had just crossed a bunch of rocks. I turned around to walk back to the beach only to realize that I had already walked by another sleeping sea lion and had just managed to not notice or step on it. The rocks were probably laden with sleeping sea lions and I very carefully found my way back to the sandy area of the beach, making sure every rock I stepped on was shiny and wet and not furry. By this time Tucker was already up the hill chasing after the penguins but when he came back he noticed the sea lions as well and decided to take an alternate route than to walk by them again. 

If you look really closely you can see Tucker scrambling up the hill to see the penguin

By then, the sun had set and the moon was slowly rising. The moon rose out off the clouds and illuminated the sky. On our very steep climb back to the top of the sand dune we all kept on looking back at the moon.

Right before the moon appeared

The moon!