As I sit here in our apartment writing this I'm wearing a mint colored shirt with an owl on it that someone who's followed our photo sets might recognize. It was my favorite shirt before we left for Iceland in May 2011 and the accompanying preferential treatment I gave it while we traveled is probably the reason I'm still able to wear it today - the only one of the four I had with me that's really still fit for public.
Read MoreMind The Gap
Holy cow. Here's what happens when we travel for awhile - diligently blogging and uploading photos and keeping up an online presence as best we can - then land back in the motherland to some amazing familiar faces with warm hugs and homes: nothing. Nothing happens. No blogging, no photos, nothing.
Read MoreNorthland Bound
One of the unforeseen benefits of travel in a vintage car - or at least in OUR vintage car - is the slower pace of speed. Perhaps, also, it is just that everyone around us, in their Japanese import, is whizzing along a few (or twenty) km per hour over the limit, causing them to pass us in droves. By the time we found ourselves on North Island roads headed towards the Waitomo Caves area, we were fully comfortable in the Sunday cruising mode.
Read MoreMasterton
In a country like New Zealand, where the population sits at somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10 times as many sheep as people, it's reasonable that there would be sheep shearers around every corner. Combine that with the natural human tendency to compete and it just makes sense that you'd also find sheep shearing competitions, which is exactly what Casey did in the Hokitika public library.
Read MoreShipping Up To Wellington
The ferry from Picton across the Cook Strait takes about three hours. That's ample time, on a day as fine as the one we had, to stroll the multiple open decks, do some reading or snoozing, and in general contemplate what it must've been like back in the day (as they say) when ships were made of wood, food was rations instead of a la carte buffet bars, and the distance to the next island/continent, if there was one, was completely unknown. Staring at the shadow of land in the distance, with nothing but ocean in the other direction will put these kinds of thoughts in your head.
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