Month: March 2008

When I posted last Saturday that Winter was over, I must have tempted fate, because Father Winter returned the next day and got the de-icing crews at YXY back to work. We’ve had a good run of days now where the temperature gets above freezing for a while now,...

The Washington Post is running an interesting poll [now gone] on what readers consider to be the best travel innovation of the last decade. The leader by far at this point is suitcases with wheels, which is what I chose. But there are a lot of great choices. For...

Back home – it feels so good! Particularly because Winter appears to be over (sorry about your luck, TamaraLyn!). Although it’s -25 at the moment, it’s a gorgeous day. My cold is worse, but our MIA suitcase is already sitting at the airport waiting to be picked up, so...

Today was all about kauri trees, the ginormous “fathers of the forest” that were all but eliminated by loggers. We saw one of the largest remaining (with a diameter of over 13 meters) in torrential rain, then visited the extremely good Kauri Museum. I all of a sudden developed...

Wednesday, March 12, 18:55 (our itinerary) Today we let someone else do the driving, and that decision gave us a much better experience than we could have gotten on our own. The tour was to Cape Reinga, New Zealand’s furthest-north point of land. Along the way we had a...

Tuesday, March 11, 18:53 (our itinerary) Our “down day” was wonderful. The day began with rain, and showers were forecast to last all day, but after some indecision we decided to go back to Matai Bay. A school group was there, but we hiked to the far end of...

Monday, March 10, 21:25 (our itinerary) When we board the plane home on Friday, there’s going to still be so much that we’d like to have done, but we’re trying hard to keep in mind that we’ve seen and done more than we dreamed possible a few years ago....

Sunday, March 9, 07:10 (our itinerary) We’re down to our last week now, and have mixed feelings about that. We both miss our home, our family and our friends, but we are really going to miss New Zealand – the land and the people. The weather has turned gorgeous,...

Tuesday, March 4, 06:45 (our itinerary) We’ve been in Wellington the past couple of days, touring, visiting with friends and their families, and in an hour or so we’ll be heading north. Internet access has been less common than I had expected, but that’s partly because of the region...