The Magic Satchel

aka Frankfurt, Rouen, Caen, on a French keyboard. So much for typing skills!

We’re in Caen today, after a pretty whirlwind tour of Frankfurt and Rouen. We’ve been taking a pile of photos but there’s no card reader on this ‘Net Cafe PC. Le crap! At least my Blackberry is charging so I can hopefully do more posts from the road. Wishing my USB plug-in would’ve lasted a few more days before frying! Anyways, on to the good stuff…
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All checked into our hostel, and back at the train station now to plan our trip to France tomorrow. It’s an 8 hour time difference, so almost 2pm here is almost 6am at home, and we’re sure feeling it. Time for lunch, coffee and fresh air, and hopefully we’ll stay awake until a decent hour. More from Rouen, France tomorrow

Five more days until we’re on de_plane.
Four more days of work (well, hopefully 3.5, but that doesn’t fit).
Three weeks travelling Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and the Czech Republic.
Two passports, backpacks & pairs of hiking boots all ready to go.
One great girl to share it all with!

Regular posts and hopefully photos to follow

To continue my verbal spewing this evening, it is time to talk about travel. Everyone likes travel! yaaay! wheee!

The Bad News: I have no plans for an other side of the world, gone for a month by myself sort of extravaganza in 2009.

The Good News: Working for a company that encourages you to take time off (unlike my previous employer who “strongly suggested” we only take time off in the slow time, and only with their approval) means I will be making a couple of smaller, gone for a week types of trips this year.
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North Island

I’m officially (sort of) finished (but there may still be additions later) uploading the first half of the trip to flickr, and today I plan on taking a good run at the south. As I’ve been going through I’ve added to just about every description, so I guess I won’t be duplicating the effort on here in the 4 posts from while I was gone (although I may add photos to what I did write)… call me lazy but that is the plan for now.

I decided that there should be 2 separate groups for this because the load time for the slide show and the set in general was taking longer than I’d like, so the two set names you need to look for now is New Zealand North Island and NZ South Island (ooo.. so creative). The link at the start of this post takes you directly to the north island set, and when the south has something worth seeing I’ll add the link at the end.

Other than this there isn’t much to report… the weather has been crap (snow for the last week or so.. I think winter missed me while I was gone) so I haven’t been biking, the Flames got eliminated from the playoffs so I’m not going to games, and in the month I’ve been home I have just been busy reconnecting the wires of my life so things can keep moving forward.

South Island

I’ve got 4 days worth of photos up on flickr right now, and it seems I’m able to sort through about 2 days worth before the story telling part of my brain gets tired.

This was the in Bay of Islands, and one of the clearest days I had in my entire trip.

I don’t get it.

of all my pictures I’ve put up from New Zealand so far… this is the most viewed?

something tells me I need to post more up, so that will be my side project tomorrow and on Sunday.

I think that if you go to the group for New Zealand 2008 (on the right side) I should be able to put them in some sort of chronological order so I don’t have to replace existing photos for the story to make sense.

or something.

I’ve actually been back in Calgary since Friday the 21st, but I haven’t been able to reach everyone to let them know, so I’m going to do it the lazy way.

I woke up on the 21st in Queenstown and discovered that even though I was half the world away… when my family gets sick so do I.

I had a massive head / chest / full body cold that was making having a coherent thought nearly impossible, and I had to finish packing to go to Fiji. Go to Fiji? To temperatures (when I checked the previous week) of +30 and above with a fever? umm… no. I lay in bed for about 20 minutes to try and convince myself that going to Fiji was the best idea, even though walking to the other side of the room would have been a chore at that point.

I thought about it while I showered, packed and got my car ready to return and I came to the conclusion that if it was cheaper to change my ticket than go to Fiji, I’d head home. It was, and so I began a delirious 24 hour journey to the comfort of home. I can’t say that at some point I didn’t waver and wish I was still on that flight to Nadi, but the cold and a weather forecast of thundershowers the entire time I was supposed to be in Fiji kept me convinced that coming home was the right decision. Laying down on my bed when I finally got here confirmed it.

After averaging around 15 hours of sleep the first two days I was home, I’m almost back to normal again. I’ve got somewhere in the area of 1500 pictures to filter through (lots of doubles, triples, wasted shots), and once I do you’ll see them up on here or on flickr. I plan on filling in the substantial gaps in my narrative, but I’ll likely just add more to the existing posts rather than try and write what I would have if I was connected every night.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a brew to hop in and a hockey game to attend.

4 days… waaaaaaah!

anyway, since we spoke last I have done the following:

took the tranz-alpine train – it was like riding through the rockies. It was nice, and if I could have got pictures there were a few amazing views that I doubt I’d have seen from the road. The problem was the open air car was like a can of sardines, and the people along the rail wouldn’t give up their spots for anything. I snapped a few and then went back to my seat.

attended a rugby game – it was fun, but considering how good one team was and how bad the other was, I was really expecting it to be Crusaders get the ball, Crusaders score. repeat. The final score was something like 60-7, but it didn’t feel completely dominant.

drove to lake tekapo – a nice emerald blue lake with a tiny church beside it.. hopefully one of my pictures is good (I haven’t seen them on a computer screen yet)

visited mount cook – even for someone with the rockies essentially in his backyard, this area was impressive. hanging glaciers, rivers, lakes, and the big daddy, Mt. Cook.

had lunch in Twizel – I wasn’t expecting much, but the meal would have rivaled presentation in the best places calgary has to offer… and it was in Twizel (pop. 1000?)

arrived in queenstown. I think I’m in for some reverse culture shock when I get home. a town of 8500 seems big to me now, so how will I deal with a city of 1 million?

that’s about it… booking more stuff today for my final few days here and then off to Fiji.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/acallihoo

photos have been updated.

An even more brief update:

Greymouth was grey, so I only stayed in town 1 night.

FJ Glacier – very cool. very tiring.

onwards today to Fox Glacier and some clear sunny pictures of FJ as yesterday was a bit cloudy.

15th – Tranz-Alpine train + a rugby game in Christchurch.

I don’t like seeing the 15th, because that means only 6 days left in NZ.

booo!