Since I didn't have much of a chance to make plans for mid-semester break I ended up in Dunedin with a mission to entertain myself for the whole week. One of my goals was to find the glow worms that I had heard about that were in walking distance from the university. I set out around 4 o'clock with rough directions I had found online. It started raining after five minutes of leaving my flat and didn't let up the whole time I was out there. It took about an hour and a half to get to the track but I had flowers and gardens to look at and a nice iPod shuffle mix to accompany it.

Pretty flowers alongside the road

Beautiful house and garden... I would love to have something like this at my own *future* house

I had been considering turning back for a while before I saw the track sign because it was getting dark and there was no shoulder on the road I was walking on. The rain didn't help either. I had a mission though so I soldiered on and found the track sign pointing upward at the muddy trail.

7 minutes? No problem. I headed up in the darkening woods and followed the markers to a stream. I didn't see any signs for glowworms so I continued up the stream and clambered over boulders until I was in the bed of the stream with steep, stone walls on either side and dark green vegetation blocking out the last of the light above. I stopped here thinking that this was far too difficult to be a seven minute journey. I also started thinking about Gollum and those terrifying hissing words of Tolkien seemed to echo around the place.

So I turned back, dejected that I had walked all this way through the rain and found no glow worms. Just as I was about to leave, I turned back for one last look and caught a glinting blue light in the leaves. Success! A small colony of glow worms were there for my viewing pleasure. They were so tiny... like little LEDs stuck in the mossy underside of the overhanging rock.