We woke up smelling vaguely sulfurous and packed up. Even though we’ve practiced the pack-up routine so many times now, it still seems to take forever. Checkout time was 10:30 and we got on the road at about 10:45.

Quick moment for Millie’s beautiful hair. I’m so jealous of it.

We drove about 2 hours, slightly out of the way, to visit Waitomo cave. We have had a couple of opportunities to see glow worm caves so we felt like we had to do it before leaving New Zealand. Today was sunny and beautiful and we drove primarily through farmland.

We had a bit of a stress out when we realized we should probably have booked ahead of time, and then saw online that there were precisely 3 tickets left for only one time slot which left 2 minutes before our GPS’s ETA. My online payment failed so I had to call, and then the call dropped right after I gave her my final card details. Luckily it all went through and Nick shaved the two minutes off the ETA by driving like GTA.

We joined our tour. There were no photos allowed in the cave (and I’m not sure I could have captured it anyway) so all I’ve got is a bad photo of us waiting to go in.

These glow worms are only found in NZ. We learned from our guide that the glowing is actually not the worms themselves, but their poop. Move over cubic wombat poop, there’s a new girl in town, and she glows.

As we walked down into the depth of the cave we talked about how many amazing caves and underground experiences we’ve had this year. The world’s largest cave in Malaysia, the underground cities and cave hotel in Turkey, the dugout mine we stayed at in the Outback, the subterranean river in Philippines… what a life we are living.

Once we were at the bottom we were loaded onto a boat and brought out into the area with the glow worms. All above us in the cave was a constellation of pin-prick sized blue lights. It really felt like looking up at a bright sky, and was mesmerizing. Here is a photo from their website to give you the gist.

And the green screen photos they made us pose for at the entrance. Excuse the watermarks but there’s no way in hell I’m paying for these.

From here we drove another 2 hours back to Auckland. We checked into our hotel and relaxed for a bit in the room. I started researching dinner but we decided we had had enough time in the car so we just went to the restaurant downstairs. It was Chilean tapas, which felt funny but kind of perfect as our last meal in New Zealand before we head to Chile tomorrow. Even though we won’t get home for a few more weeks, this feels like the start of the homestretch. Today we looked up the time difference and we’ll be just an hour apart from Austin. Millie will no longer be able to brag on phone calls home about being in the future.