JUNE 15 2024: 

Addendum to my New Zealand trip saga: Deborah Davies has FINALLY given me permission to let you know that she drove us all over the North Island on our many wonderful adventures even though she was suffering horribly with broken ribs which she sustained just a day after our arrival. (She wouldn’t let me divulge that until now.) I want to thank her again for her heroic commitment to being our driver during our time there. There is NO WAY Lisa and I could have driven, since neither of us felt comfortable driving on the left side of the road! When Deborah commits, she commits absolutely. HUGS and GREAT THANKS!

And thanks again to Helen Schofield for doing the research and the advance bookings, and for deciding where we would go (other than Hobbiton and The Weta Workship, which Lisa and I knew about beforehand). There wasn’t a missed beat; we had a grand time! UNFORGETTABLE!

 

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Those “New Zealand in the Rear View Mirror”memories blog posts took days and days to do, mostly because I had to push each of the hundreds of images separately from my phone to my email address and then to my PC before I could include them. And because I was suffering from COVID, I wasn’t able to do them for more than an hour or an hour and a half per day. I’m certainly glad THAT chore is over with for the most part. If Lisa has images I missed, or can share videos I can’t, I’m sure she will add them in the appropriate places when she gets her feet back under a desk again.

 

I’m glad I took daily notes of what we did, as Helen suggested, because they sure helped me to remember, and to put everything in order as each adventure happened.  Using those notes and the activities calendar she gave us made the writing part much easier. My brain felt full of cotton most of the time.  And you should have seen some of the typos I made, after not being at a keyboard for more than two weeks. It was appalling!  I had to go back through each one and re-read them so I could fix the countless typos that appeared in the first drafts.

 

I also realize that many of the images I put on my Facebook page didn’t make it into the blog posts because so many of them were videos. I couldn’t get my videos to send to my PC without them becoming blurry, and I can’t use the ones on my FB page because they saved as a webpage, so none of the movies made it to my blog. So you’ll have to go to Facebook to hear the audio anamatronic dinosaurs and to see the movies I took at the Kelly Tarleton SeaLife Aquarium of the many sharks, penguins, sting rays, and other sea life I videotaped there…

 

My favorite photos from our vacation

(not in order, as there is no way to decide that):

 

 

This figure towered above us more than two stories tall.

The image doesn’t do it justice.