This was a fairly uneventful day compared to the rest of the journey. We had to get up early to make the shuttle, and had a few minutes of panic when we couldn’t find the key to our room to return. Turns out it was in fact in the most likely place, under the sofa cushions. The bus schedule worked out so as to allow us to spend a few hours in the city of Thames before making the final leg of our trip back to Auckland, so we took advantage of that. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t count on everything in Thames being closed on Tuesday. We checked out 3 different museums and an art gallery, all of them had something to the effect of, open Thursday-Sunday, or Wed-Monday, but all of them were closed on Tuesday and I have no idea why, but it meant that we ended up spend some time chilling in a café instead of exploring the finer points of the city.
When we eventually made it back to the dorm I was pretty glad to be back, I was pretty tired overall after the 8 days, and I had a good deal of homework that had to be done that I was glad to finally get a start on. But of course, as is fitting, the dinner the night we got back was really really bad. The food gets worse when the number of people dropped and I think that might have been the low point of the whole vacation, because there was no selection at all, very disappointing. (Though on a happier note there is now a new chef and the food for the past few days has been significantly better then normal).