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December 07, 2005
and once again i am safely come
i've spent like 2 days deleting pictures, putting them on eloise and labelling them (shoddily). i deleted almost half the pictures, 350ish, which still leaves an absurd amount of pictures. but i did seperate them into easily accessible smaller categories:
auckland
waiheke island
queenstown
bungee jumping
glenorchy
te anau and fjordland national park
milford sound
wanaka
haast pass
west coast
fox and franz joseph glacier
lake m-something
abel tasman national park
pancake rocks
marlborough sounds
wellington
LoTR tour and palliser seal colony
SOME people have complained that my posts don't provide enough background or information about what i was actually doing. so i tried in the captions to sometimes provide a running commentary about the place i was in and what i was doing. but i'll do a little summary too.
nuala and i flew into auckland where we spent a couple of days. one of those days was spent going to waiheke island which is a 35 minute boat ride nort of auckland. this island was pretty narrow in the middle so we walked from one side to the other and played on two different beaches. in auckland itself mostly what we did was shop, walk around, and go to a museum. we were sort of terrible at acclimating, we would sleep in and then totally conk out pretty early in the evening.
then we flew to queenstown which is in the south island, near the bottom. we were there for a day and a half on our own and we wandered all over town (again shopping). then, our third day there we started our tour of the south island. so we met lynette, our kiwi guide, and hugh and dya, the other people on the tour. hugh and dya are married, our age, live in north carolina now but met in high school in miami, they own their own real estate business, and are much, MUCH more grown-up than me. lynette is also married. her husband was an urak-hai in the movies and is the ski coach for the new zealand olympic team. lynette has been guiding forever for different companies and was a driver sometimes for the movies. over the next 11 days the 5 of us drove from queenstown to wellington accomplishing an amazing amount of stuff. we watched nuala bungee-jump, went horseback riding, biked down mountains, overnight cruise in a fjord, swam in a river, swam in a lake, biked down another mountain, hiked a mountain, hiked a glacier, hiked on another glacier, saw seals, saw penguins, fed horses, went to a winery, swam in the ocean, etc., etc.
at the end of the tour, nuala and i were dropped off in wellington where we spent the last few days of our trip. in wellington we, again, shopped, went to a museum, walked all over, and went on a LoTR tour which i have already written about.
it was a really full 3 weeks but i had an awesome time.
oh and also i haven't put captions on two of the sub-categories yet. working on it though, i swear.
Posted by michele at December 7, 2005 03:53 PM
Comments
Posted by: marina at December 7, 2005 05:10 PM
and there’s still all of nuala’s pictures too. and then hugh and dya are sending me some that they took of me and nuala too.
Posted by: michele at December 7, 2005 05:58 PM
i made it through all of them! you did very good with your storytelling and captions and whatnot. i would have commented on them more, but then i got scared your NZ friends would be reading them.
Posted by: marina at December 8, 2005 08:19 AM
yeah they will be reading them, but you can still comment. it’s ok. unless you were going to say mean things about them for some reason. in which case, totally not ok to comment.
Posted by: michele at December 8, 2005 10:12 AM
Posted by: michele at December 8, 2005 10:13 AM
Can we be a little mean about your NZ friends? I mean, these are just not attractive people.
Okay, I haven`t looked at a lot of the pictures yet. But I did see Nuala swinging back and forth really fast on a string in what looked like an unbelievably unhealthy way.
Posted by: jason at December 8, 2005 11:12 AM
it was just that i had SO MANY comments, that really weren’t insightful or entertaining or anything, and i didn’t want to flood the pictures with my insipid remarks. they are far more conversational, so i’ll just call you sometime this weekend and we can talk about your trip. also, nuala’s movie was terrifying. especially when she would “disappear” on the screen or look like she was about to spring back up and hit the bridge. i gasped.
Posted by: marina at December 8, 2005 11:20 AM
snort. that video is awesome. so many of my other videos wouldn’t upload. there’s this brilliant one on the cattle guard and then another one when we’re kayaking. gene’s going to look at them this weekend.
and dood, please, i love insipid comments. say whatever you want.
jason, you are a brute. dya and lynette are gorgeous and hugh has quite the upper body. so you can shut up.
Posted by: michele at December 8, 2005 12:36 PM
Posted by: didofoot at December 8, 2005 01:09 PM
I have only looked at some oft he galleries, but Here are my favorites so far:
Rajah, Maori Kama sutra, the captions about being on a boat, pictures form the wal kacross the island, the “rained on” picture of Nuala, everything related to the sheep sculture, Michele and shooting/being shot, the sheep/cow irony, that Nuala sort of looks like a kidnappee in the bungee boat, and the non-boring LOTR story.
I have a lot of picture-looking still ahead of me.
Posted by: sean at December 8, 2005 02:46 PM
Notice how none of Sean`s favorites had your hideous friends in them?
(I would also like to put in a vote for “Kidnapee in a Bungee Boat.” They should make it into a holographic stamp.)
Posted by: jason at December 8, 2005 04:46 PM
sean, dood, i don’t mean to be offensive but were you drunk at 2 in the afternoon when you typed that? i was sitting here trying to puzzle out what “wal kacross” meant forEVER. however my delight that you liked my pictures has totally swayed my foot from any kicking of balls it might have been planning. wal kacross. i really wanted it to somehow be wallabees and kangaroos. but that’s australia.
jason, thank god i wasn’t drinking tea. holographic stamp indeed.
p.s. nuala, i don’t think i really apologized for making you go thru that entire stamp exhibit at the te papa for what, like an hour? meem sworry. fucking stamps and their siren call.
Posted by: michele at December 8, 2005 07:22 PM
Posted by: sean at December 8, 2005 10:52 PM
that’s not true, usually you have excellent penmenship. virtually.
hey, are you coming tomorrow? i have a present for you! if you don’t come i will have to stuff it in your mailbox somehow. do you have a mailbox?
Posted by: michele at December 8, 2005 11:06 PM
I got a mailbox. It has a key, but we don’t lock it. All of this irrelevant since I’ll be there tomorrow.
I really am terrible at typing. It is my secret shame.
Please don’t steal our mail.
Posted by: sean at December 9, 2005 03:09 AM
Posted by: sean at December 9, 2005 10:03 AM
Posted by: michele at December 9, 2005 11:17 AM
I like how Sean likes the pictures where i look horrible. There are lots of pictures where I look horrible. Could you not have deleted them too?
Posted by: nuala at December 10, 2005 07:41 AM
Posted by: michele at December 10, 2005 10:24 AM
Posted by: nuala at December 10, 2005 10:50 AM
Posted by: sean at December 10, 2005 03:33 PM
Posted by: nuala at December 11, 2005 07:14 AM