Excuses from Australia

29 July 2012

G’day Blog Followers,
Greetings from Sydney, Australia. My apologies for not keeping up better with this blog. I still owe you postings from Fiji and New Zealand. My excuse is that I’m too busy to write during the day and too tired to do so in the evenings.
I wrote a draft about Fiji during my flight from there to New Zealand. I had intended to finish it up yesterday on my 3½ hour flight from Auckland, New Zealand to Sydney. However, I was totally wasted having gotten up at 3:00AM to make my 6:05AM flight. So instead of writing I kinda slept (you know how you kinda, but not really, sleep on a flight). Why did I take such an early flight? Easy – the ticket was only 129 bucks. Any other flight was at least 100 bucks higher.
I have a little time this morning before I take the train out to a suburb to meet a colleague for lunch and an afternoon of looking at erosion control work on local highways. Yeah, not very exciting to most of you but I took a ferry through Sydney Harbour yesterday and then walked across the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. So I got some of the local site seeing stuff out of the way. Gorgeous city and so is Auckland, New Zealand, by the way.
I’m feeling well except that my feet are tired from all the walking I’ve been doing. Stomach is good (Judy will be pleased to know that I’m eating from my green group).
Pain in the ass about this blog is that it takes so long to download and caption photos. And it’s been hard to find free or reasonably-priced internet. I don’t mind paying 55 cents for an hour of internet like I did in Fiji but It really annoys me to pay 5 or 10 bucks.
Below is a photo proving I really was in New Zealand and not just sitting on my ass on the beach back in Honolulu.

We’re not in Kansas, Toto.  A cold but sunny winter day on the Tongariro Alpine Crossing
(North Island, New Zealand) with Mount Ngauruhoe (2290m – 7513ft) in the background.
 

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