Almost there!

We are on descent to Dublin! I'm very happy, mostly because I'm finally excited about being there but mostly to get off the plane. I was surrounded by a group of Italian kids from a boarding school. It was the worst flight I've ever had.

Blog Ressurection

New post, and in less than 10 years even! Since this blog is so that Jester and me could blog about or New Zealand trip, the name isn't perfect.

Anyway, I've got a trip coming up, this time to Ireland. Originally, Jester and myself were planning to take this as mancation 2.0, however, since he took a new job, we decided to cancel this year. Since I still want to take a vacation, I am.

Like NZ, I will be doing self drive, but instead of motels, I will be staying in B&Bs. Also, I will be taking this trip with my dad and his GF. That'll be interesting, hopefully not in a bad way.

Of more interest, is reflecting on how much technology has shifted since we did NZ. In NZ we were wondering if our phones would work, and what kind of Internet access we could get, if any. Now, I'm confident I'll have at least some sort of access from my phone, it's just a question of how fast it will be.

Even the phones themselves have shifted hugely. The easiest way of describing how much is to just say the iPhone has come out since then.

Blogging on the other hand, has kinda become passé, still, I may try and document it here anyway.

So let's see how this goes!

mms test

i have a suspicion the this is going to end up somewhere i dont want it to.

One Year Later

Well, not quite one year, but it approaches rapidly. No new travel this year, I think this winter I will begin planning something for next year.

I'm posting mainly to update a few things. Our New Zealand pictures are up. They can be found here:
http://www.fubarphotos.com/main.php/v/NZ2006/

and here:
http://www.fubarphotos.com/main.php/v/NZ-Dave/

To Infinity and Beyond!

First set of pictures is up

I've got all my pics bulk converted and posted online. I'll have Jester's up soon too.
Click here for the album

Highest Paved Road in New Zealand

This is just before our flat tire. Location is best described in two words: VERY. COLD. We took this route because it's shorter than going the long way around, but it's also a really fun drive - lots of twisties. 

TheJester Paraglides

Jester went Paragliding in Queenstown a few days ago. They're cool enough to have a digital camera with them on a long stick with a remote shutter release. They hold it out, and then aim it back at you for the photo you see here. As Cleric sez "eet is a camera on a steeck". We're about 1000 feet up over the bay here. Right after this was taken, we heeled way over and did a tight descending spiral and pulled a few g's. Was AWESOME. So much fun. Doro's gotta try this. The interesting part of doing this is you start out by basically walking off of a cliff, and letting the wind grab your chute and pull you up into the air. SO much fun. 

Queenstown Botanic Gardens

Posting this a few days late - we went through the Queenstown Botanic Gardens a few days ago. Ocean view, cool breeze, fantastic view. TheCleric and I agreed: if they'd had Internet access and power there, we'd probably not have moved for the rest of the day. :)
This is a closeup of an interesting plant called a MonkeyPuzzle Tree. It's like a variant on a pine tree, with a few noteable exceptions: the "needles" as you can see here aren't really needles. They're more like narrow, sharp-pointed leaves. Also, the WHOLE PLANT is covered in them. I imagine it's totally un-climbeable: only the main trunk isn't covered with these - everything else: all branches, all tips, everthing, is covered in these sharp spines. Just touching them puts them through your skin - like needles. Really cool looking - this one was at least 5 stories tall. 

Flat Tire

Coming down this mountain slope from the Highest Paved Road in NZ (shown here) we got a flat just before it got dark. It was all really fun switchbacks with no shoulder and blind corners (a blast to drive!) so we couldn't easily pull over. We had to go about 1/3 of the way down before we could find a pulloff. Totalled the tire - hole was too big to patch, and we had to run it flat long enough to get off the road, so we basically pulverized the sidewall and melted the tire at the same time. Oh, and it was really cold and windy. Never before have we changed a tire so quickly. :) 

Pillars of the Kings and the Return of the TeamGeek

what you are seeing is the river Anduin. Here, Aragorn and the Fellowship passed the Pillars of Kings. I don't actually know what the name of the river is off hand, bus this was one of the locations we are sure was in Lord of the Rings(scene where they are in boats going down the river and there are 2 large statues on the sides of the valley). It was pretty cool...we also went up to the winery that sits on this, or this sits on, and picked up some wine.

I'm posting from the Starbucks in Christchurch. They had Internet access and are near to our motel tonight, which is important as we have bid our rental car adieu, after some brief heart palipitations. I called to verify the location of drop off and the first guy, who sounded like he was probably in Bombay but would have claimed to be in Orlando, Florida, said, "You are supposed to return it to Wellington." For those not keeping track, Wellington would be on the north island, and the car was not getting returned there unless it could float.

So we did get that straightned, and we had a nice bit of luck, the hotel we are at was booked so full we got a magic upgrade to a bigger suite room. I'm sure the room we would have got would have been great anyway. This is my official plug for South Pacific Tours, they did a great job, Sandi(our agent) was really good to work with and really helpful when Chicago/weather/United screwed the pooch and we missed our original flight. I highly recommend them. I'd also like to say the tourist industry is actually really nice here, not out of control, and not too gouging. That could just be the general nice setup of most things here. Although I still get quesiton marks with everything closing at 4...

Which leads to...Christchurch, where everything does not actually close at 4! It's actually a bit odd to see so much open! Also they have real 4 lane roads here, real traffic, and not quite congestion, but some messy streetage. So driving here is interesting. Jester and me agree, we're both conerned about re-adapting to driving at home, since we're both pretty comfortable on the wrong side of the road now. Although there was a PL5(that's Pucker Level) moment today when a car in the oncoming traffic direction decided to make a quick pass in a short gap...I believe my response was, "OOOOOooooooo".

Tonight should be a fun filled romp of repacking and DVD burning so that I have a copy of the pictures too, and prep for tomorrow. I think we've settled on taking a taxi to the airport but we are worried we have enough funds between the 2 of us to afford it. We'd rather not withdraw more funds if we can avoid it. We're trying to spend all the NZ$ in NZ. Christchurch is nice though, seems like a nice city otherwise. I can't say that anything stands out per se, as we won't have much time to look around. They have a lot of greenspace, but they are enough of a big city that we can't see the ocean or mountains which are both near the city.

The last thing to do is arrive at the airport tomorrow early, probably around 1PM, we're trying to get our hop flights to Auckland sync'd, as right now my flight is 1 hour later then Jesters. If not, not big deal, we'll manage. I think with that, this will very likely be my last entry from New Zealand, it's been great, I highly recommend it. I might post one more entry from the States, advice for travelling to NZ and any loose ends(like the location of the website for pictures and the web based scrap book I'm going to make). Farewell NZ!
The Cleric 

Nov 8 - "Ride Me" and Faith Based Driving

So the partially obscured image you see is the tattoo on the lower back of a girl we saw at the top of the gondola ride in Queenstown. It’s a little hard to make out, but it says “Ride Me”. Sadly, I wussed out of flat out asking her if I could take a picture, so what you see above is the best effort to sneak one. It’s the first lower back tattoo I’ve seen that I can recall since we’ve been here. Tattoos don’t seem as common here as in the US, but piercings seem to be more common, if anything. Lots of pierced nostrils and lips here.

The other part of the title is what I have labeled driving in New Zealand. It’s very apparent that Kiwi’s very early on must develop a certain amount of faith that the lorry (that’s a truck to us Yanks) in the oncoming traffic lane around the blind turn or over the blind hill is in it’s correct, intended lane. The faith works both ways of course, and I say the have to develop it because I think I have seen exactly 2 turns in NZ that weren’t blind. You have more views of magnificent precipices that you could easily drive off of then you do of the oncoming lane of traffic. If it weren’t for the driving on the other side of the road, I’d strongly advocate sending Americans here for a week to learn to drive. There’s no “not paying attention to the road” here. You pay attention or you get flattened. I wonder what the accident statistics are like here.

So we drove to Dunedin today, from Queenstown. I’ve been having a great time, the scenery is fantastic, and traveling about with the Jester has been great fun, but I think I’m ready to pause for a bit. The downside of seeing so much of the country in such a short period of time is that you burn out from being always on the move. We go from here to Christchurch, and final winding down to head back to the States. Last night I didn’t sleep well, couldn’t get to sleep, and woke up early. It was like I had an exam today or something. Jester developed a migraine, or started to; he’s catching a nap in the other room right now. So I think the travel has started to take its toll on us. The weather today was also not great, so that wasn’t much help. I’ve started to look forward to getting home, organizing the photos and making a trip scrapbook type thing (which will most likely be online of course, although I am thinking maybe I should print off a batch of the better pictures). Seeing the friends and such is also sounding good. I’m going to really realize just how out of touch I’ve been the last few weeks when I get home.

Let’s see…drive here was not bad, despite the weather. We stopped at a Lord of The Rings filming location, one that I think is very recognizable, the Pillars of Kings on the River Anduin. I will of course have to check my DVDs when I get home and compare to photos. I’ll put some kind of screen capture of the scene vs. my picture up. Geek cool! We also stopped at the winery that the location sits on and picked up some wine. Sadly, there was no “Return of the King” label wine.

We bought sandwiches this morning, planning on stopping at a scenic location to eat them. The weather foiled this plan, and we hit some construction (we suspect they were clearing the road of debris from a rock slide) which sat us on the highway for 20 or so minutes so we ended up eating mostly there, in the car. Oh and it started to snow (small hail really) while we were eating. Once we got rolling again we stopped a little further up at a nice lookout point, finished eating, and took some more pictures of the strangely green water. Had we mentioned the water yet? All the bodies of water in this country seem to be this deep, but bright shade of green. It shows up well in the pictures, that’s not a goof on the cameras part, it’s really that color. No idea why. Dunedin is a bit of a mess, and oh, they actually had HIGHWAYS on the way in. Not much by our standards, but a little bit. It was odd actually driving on two-lane high speed roadways again. Return to civilization!

Now that I said that, I just realized I think that’s nearly true. Our next stop is Christchurch, the major city of the south island, so we are most likely done with wilderness areas, other then the final drive to CC. The CC drive is along the coast, so I expect it will be very nice, and since it is our last drive, and we are in CC for a day, I feel no need to hurry. I expect we’ll make several scenic stops. Hey, it just started raining! For real rain though, not the miserable cold drizzle that’s been pretending to be rain most of the time we said there was rain! Maybe that means we’ll be owed some sunshine tomorrow!

Back to the drive in…supporting the getting wore out theory, Jester and me both took brief naps in the car during the drive, something we’d both managed to avoid doing until now. The landscape is still varied and incredible, but it’s hard to get decent photos with this weather, and missing 30 minutes of it isn’t the end of the world. Dunedin is a college town it seems, with the University of Otago, Dunedin College of Education, and Otago Polytechnic all located here. The total enrollment is around twenty thousand, so none too large by US standards. I don’t know how that places them in NZ ones.

I’m not sure how much we’ll get done in Dunedin, we had some stuff planned out, but the traffic and roads here are a mess(lots of one ways, and complex traffic patterns) and the rain means we probably won’t want to walk much. Not too much of a loss I suspect, the things we’d be going to see are city color, like a train station, so if we miss it, not a big loss, not to me anyway, that’s not what I came down here to see. I’ll have to write another post later about what we actually end up doing. 

Nov 6 - Franz Josef

We’re getting ready to depart F-J for some of the longer drives ahead of us. That’s not so great. What’s great is we’ll be passing through a mountain range called the Southern Alps by the locals. I’ve looked at the route and it should provide some pretty spectacular views. That’s the norm in this country, so unsurprising. After having scrambled around those rocks the other day, I wish we had time to do more such goofing off, but I’m primarily here oriented as a photography/sight seeing trip, so more active activities will likely have to wait until the next time I visit. I think that you’ve have to focus the geography you’ll be playing in much more to do that here too. Unless you are here for like a month, there are just too many places to explore and trek around in to be able to do more then 1 a week.

Today takes us to Queenstown, which is relatively far to the south. It’s impressive looking on the map until you look at a city map and realize it’s quite small. According to the resources we have with us, it has a permanent population of 11,000 with more then 1 million tourists passing through annually. I guess that makes me 1 in a million, yuk yuk.

Many LoTR scenes were filmed in the regions surrounding QT, so I think we may catch one or two, and Jester also mentioned the possibility of an aerial trip. We’ll swing through town so we can catch a shot of the Internet Bus on the way out. Oh, one thing we were noticing here in F-J. We’ve seen several girls walking about who appear to be couples, or at least far friendlier with each other then girls in the States seem to be with each other. We haven’t noticed it elsewhere, which might not mean anything, but guys do tend to notice things like that.

Jester mentioned to me yesterday that NZ would be a really great place to retire to. I could see that. Living here now would probably be tough for me, but retiring some day far off might be cool. It’s a really awesome place for nature, until you want something you get from modern society, then things could get ugly. Decent Internet access throughout the country would go a long way to fixing that though. I live for information, and it’s not as easily had here as I’m used to.

Oh, one other thing which I had commented on to Jester several days ago, but I think is worth a mention here. Due to our US-centric focus of news, what we most often seem to get the impression of is that the US is sucky/declining, and things are fabulous in the rest of the world and we should take more after them. Well you read world news here, and what you see is a couple pages on the US, which like the US, is focused on our elections and what they mean. And then a whole lot of pages about how the rest of the world is in fact not quite as rosy as some in the US might think. There’s no shortage of problems elsewhere in the world. Fiji (where more then one person suggested I go spend a week) is on the verge of either a military coup or a civil war, Italy is having a mafia war so severe that the government is considering army intervention, and NZ seems to have some employment issues. Papers are using the number of jobs listed in them as a selling point.

Greetings from Dunedin

After much correction by locals, we have the pronunciation (or at least one of them) for our current location correctly sussed. It's "Du-NEED-in".
And have we mentioned, paying for Internet access by the minute stinks? We're in an internet cafe that closes "late", which is, appearantly, 8pm. We're not sure what New Zealanders do at night, but it's appearantly not anything involving retail, because they rolled up the streets here at 4pm. :)

Whinging aside, we're doing well. Drive from Queenstown today was about 5 hours, plus a stop at a vineyard (Gewurtztraminer purchased), and another stop at a LOTR site. We'll send photos, but today's stop was where the Fellowship was boating down the Anduin river, and they pass the Gate of the Kings. Ask Brian for a translation of that, everybody. :)


Yesterday in Queenstown, we did the Street Luge (which I think makes us BIG LUGERS ha ha!) tho it was on a track, not actually on a street with peds, cars and oil spills. So pretty safe.

The Cleric watched while TheJester did a tandem paraglide from approx 3000 feet up down to about 1000 feet. Wicked fun! Doro- you gotta try this - I have their card, and photos. Much fun.
They're closing here, so we'll see you later and post photos when we have better access.
Love to all!
-TheJester