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.