When I traveled around the South Island of New Zealand in 2010, I drove down the east coast and cut across to the fjord country through Queenstown. Circling the South Island with my son in 2014, we started by driving along the west coast. Our…
Milford Sound lies in Fiordland National Park and is one of the more accessible and dramatic openings to the Tasman Sea. The land along its coast is host to the famous four-day hiking route in New Zealand, the Milford Track. It was named by an early…
Digging down into the bottom layer of my suitcase, I took out my few warmies, ready for the chill of a higher altitude, and headed up to the mountains. A serene scene welcomed me to my stop for the night by Lake Tekapo, a huge…
I visited the city of Christchurch twice. Although it’s the largest city on the South Island of New Zealand, and the second largest in the country, it’s not that big—the population is less than 400,000. Between those visits in 2010 and 2014, on February 22,…
The drive down the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island was as beautiful as I had hoped. It reminded me of the drive along the coast of Ireland, a trip I took, oddly enough, with the friend I had just visited in Melbourne the week…
I had originally planned on doing a hike, or tramp as it’s called by Kiwis, along part of the Abel Tasman Coastal Track in the National Park at the north end of New Zealand’s South Island, but I was in no shape for tramping, having sprained…
After planning and revising my route many times in 2010, I finally decided to spend most of my two weeks driving the South Island of New Zealand, with an emphasis on sea and coast rather than mountains, where I live when I’m in the states. I…
When I have traveled with my son, I’ve asked him what he wants to include on the trip. His choices have taken us to some places I might not have visited: the United Nations when in New York, Pompeii in Italy, and Carthage in Tunisia…
A road trip away from Auckland is Rotorua, an area called Te Puia by the Maori. The nearby thermal reserve is bubbling and spewing with geysers, a dramatic place to walk—very carefully! The Pohutu Geyser, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest natural geyser, erupts two or three…
The first time I visited New Zealand in 2010, while I was teaching in Japan, I didn’t spend much time on the North Island. If you’ve been following my last few blog posts, you know I sprained my ankle right before leaving Australia. That story…
The Great Ocean Road follows the rugged coastline west of Melbourne skirting Australia’s southern shore. First stop on a day bus tour was Bell’s Beach, the famous surfer’s beach, relatively calm on this day in 2010. Fishermen were out early on Lorne’s Pier, sting rays…
Melbourne has a more open and casual feel than Sydney, a harmonious blend of Victorian buildings and attractive modern architecture, topped with a crisp blue sky during my visit in 2010. I rode the train to Southern Cross Station, an open metallic structure with a flowing…
While teaching in Japan in 2010, I went south for the long winter break to a continent I hadn’t visit before. I have never gotten over the magic of boarding a plane in one place, reading and sleeping for a while, maybe watching a movie,…
In November, I spent a few days in Las Vegas, not one of my favorite places, for a Canadian niece’s wedding. In the campy, yet classic, White Chapel, they were married by an Elvis impersonator, a fun choice to experience the eccentricity and glitz of…
My small historic mountain town in the Rockies knows how to celebrate holidays. Georgetown, Colorado’s Christmas Market, held the first two weekends of December each year, often places in the top ten as best holiday market in the country, despite competing with large cities around…
Who knew there were so many festivals in Scotland? A few years ago, my brother, son, and I took part in unique, fascinating celebrations all over that northern stretch of Great Britain in just two weeks. This is a reprise of one of my first…
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Lovely, my adventurous traveling friend. How did you like the “fresh” fish?
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Thank you! It was fine once it was cut up. I prefer not to think that my teeth were the instrument that killed something.
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