Poor Kiwi Folk

When Nico and I moved to New Zealand, we knew we would be giving up European travel and expensive tandem vacations. This weekend however, an expensive tandem vacation came to us.

We joined the tour for a ride through Rotorua. Here are Bill and Jan McCready slowing down enough to have their picture taken.

And here are a bunch of tandems riding through some geothermal death spas. Sorry, I have no photos of the descent (on an MTB) track through the Redwood Forest.


A ride up some hills took us to the Buried Village of Te Wairoa.


I seem to have not taken many photographs...probably because it spent a fair amount of time raining; but I did finally get the opportunity to use my new flash.


The next day, we took an opportunity to climb Mt. Maunganui...


...and were rewarded with a world class view.


Onward to the Coromandel, where we stayed in an authentic Kiwi bach in Tairua. With a couple of days of cleaning and a few bug bombs, it would have been a nice play to stay...we'll just leave it at that, as the owner has been rather nice in addressing my complaints.

Though we have not been on a Santana tour in close to three years (except for New Zealand, which nobody was ready to repeat yet), we were happy to see some familiar faces.


And I just can't get enough of that Kiwi Dundee.

For the two or three of you that refuse to join facebook:

Nicole and I are fine. We're in Napier (on the North Island) and did not feel the earthquake at all.

Art Deco Classic Car Parade

(These photos are completely unedited...sorry if some of them are not slide show worthy...)

Deco Weekend

Napier in the 30s


People kept asking Nico if they could take her photo. It's kind of going to her head.


Nicole prepared the best picnic ever.


But we were hopelessly outdone by the Buchanans.

Published again

I'm thinking maybe I should start charging...

Bicycling and becoming Kiwi

It's been a while since I've posted, so I thought I would run through the camera's memory card to see what we've been doing lately.

It looks like we've been cycling a bit; which is good, as we have less than a month to get ready for NZ Tandem Tour II.

This is what I look like eating gelato.

This is what we look like after winning the Rugby World Cup [Attention Americans: In case you were wondering, the Rugby World Cup is given to the best dressed cyclist.]

This is what Nicole looks like in 33 degree heat.


This is where we stopped to stretch our legs (or rather, it's one of about 13 such spots).


This is as far from civilization as I ever want to be when we're out of water.


This is what Nicole looks like in 33 degree heat when the cows won't share their water.


In other news, I'd like to say this is the before photo, but unfortunately it is the (yet to be improved) small upstairs deck.


This is the big deck. Yes, I spent the day washing my deck, and then rubbing oil on my deck. (This is funny only if read with a Kiwi accent...but not to Kiwis, who think it's funny when I say "deck".)

Did I mention I've had no formal training?

Actually, I guess that's not true. I took a photography class in high school...

But I digress. I am taking a much needed brake from hours of boring paperwork. I do not recollect seeing this photo until shortly before we moved to New Zealand. My mother had a 5 x 7 copy in her china cabinet with a bunch of old family photos. "I used to be pretty." she said when I commented on it.

I scanned this one from a wallet sized photo I found with some high school stuff. Her hair looks a little grainy; otherwise, not a bad enlargement.


A quick tree update. Thank you to everyone who has contributed. (I promise to get real thank you letters out eventually.)

You can take a crosstown bus if it's raining or it's cold II

Weekend trip to look at another boat. The boat turned out to be more of a project than I am interested in taking on at present (especially if Nico is going to make me keep gardening).

A few highlights of our trip to Auckland:

Breakfast at Sheinkin, an "Israeli-Inspired" Restaurant. I'm not really sure what that means. Probably the place is owned by Israelis, but Israeli food turned out to not be popular, so it became a sort of Kiwi-Israeli-Eastern European fusion sort of restaurant. (I had salmon and eggs; they were good, but I don't think you'll find them in Israel...)


Coast to Coast walkway, a 16 km walk across Auckland. It's supposed to take 4 hours, but could take much, much longer if you felt like stopping at any of the sites you pass along the way. A few highlights of our walk across Auckland during our trip to Auckland:

A cricket game in the Auckland Domain. (A domain is a park, in case you don't read Nico's blog. There is no link to Nico's blog because her blog does not deserve a link.)


View from the top of Mount Eden.


Climb up One Tree Hill (As sung about by U2.)

Nicole taking one of many breaks (this one on the porch of an old cottage that was relocated to this location in 1920).

These may look like regular sheep, but they are clearly city sheep.


Crazy college kids. (In case you have a small monitor, it's a play on the quadratic equation.)


View from the top of One Tree Hill (notice how far away downtown has gotten).


We took the bus back to the hotel, rather than walking another 16 km (actually, with all the missed turns and back tracking, I'm sure it was more like 20 km).

Saturday night, we caught the late show at Auckland's (only?) comedy club. I can't say that I get Kiwi humour yet, and the only really funny guy was Maori...probably not a good idea for me to tell Maori jokes.

Sunday morning: coffee as big as your head, man.

Coffee in New Zealand usually comes with a fern leaf on top. If the barista likes you, you might get a heart.

Some boats at low tide at Shelly Park Beach.


Don't ask what we were doing in Shelly Park...

Tree #1

This isn't really tree #1, it's a bonus tree that my coworkers bought for me after I requested they not send flowers. It came from a friend's family farm, and I'm told that if I treat it right, it will someday give us avocados.


Although our backyard is spacious, we had no room for another tree, so I spent a couple of weeks carving up the jungle. I'm still not finished, and I don't know what I'm going to do with all these bags of vines, trees, weeds, etc. (A macadamia nut tree is on the way from the same farm, so I really should get back to work.)

Tree meter

Just a little update to this post, since I'm on a blogging rampage tonight. .

114 trees funded; 246 left to go 148 trees funded; 212 left to go!