Thank You! to John, Dave and Jerry who joined me at the Symonds Street Starbucks. It was very nice to meet you all. I’m sorry there’s no group shot, but in addition to not all being there at the same time, my “camera person” had elected to sleep in that morning. And for the record, … Read more
I was expecting not to be too impressed with Auckland. Not sure why, just didn’t expect to be.
Today was a “day off”, so we shuttled into “downtown” Rotorua for some shopping and just general wandering around.
I may never eat eggs again. 
The Lord of the Rings was filmed in several locations all over New Zealand. Even just flying into Queenstown on our arrival evoked images of many beautiful scenes from the movie.
So, it only made sense that we would take a “Lord of the Rings” based tour while we were here.
With the cancellation of the planed activities up in Port Douglas due to Cyclone Olga, we took our first formally organized tour – a bus tour up into the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
The weather threatened (again) but things turned out quite well.
Here’s a thousand words:
Yep – I took that, and yes, that’s the view out of our hotel room.
Actually it’s a small part of the view, since to the right is Circular Quay, and to the left the Sydney Harbor bridge.
I did take a panoramic shot from the roof of the hotel. (Because of the layout of the accessible roof portion, the picture’s mostly roof, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.)
Monsoon
Olga was a bust. Lots of warning, lots of cancellations (including most of our plans in Port Douglas), but then … nothing.
Nada.
Zip.
Monday was a quiet, almost windless day. Hot and humid.
As part of setting up this trip, I’d booked a few activities that were to take place today (Sunday, as I write this) and tomorrow.
Note the words “were to take place”.
It turns out that 30 years ago Kathy and I got married during “cyclone season”.
How … interesting.
So when I started putting together an itinerary for this trip I asked Kathy if there was anything in particular she wanted to see or do or whatever.
She had only one request:
“I want to hold a Koala.”
Actually the title is a misnomer.
Folks overseas probably thing this is kinda silly, but as it turns out our cell phones simply won’t work overseas. In our case our carrier (Verizon) uses CDMA technology which isn’t even used overseas. Other carriers use the more globally accepted GSM technology, but “lock” their cell phones to their networks. Get a phone from AT&T, and it’ll work with AT&T, and that’s about it.
With our upcoming trip, we don’t really need a cell phone, but we’ve come to rely on its convenience and security.
The Dungeness River flows north from the Mountains on Washington’s Olympic peninsula along side the city of Sequim and empties into the Strait of Juan de Fuca which separates the United States from Canada’s Vancouver Island (and, coincidentally, my birthplace, Victoria).
Along the way from mountains to ocean, the Dungeness passes the small community where our vacation rental happens to be located.
So this morning I went for a walk.
