Celtic Motel Foxton

After a pleasant enough, but not very sunny crossing from Picton back to Wellington on North island, we drove North to Foxton Beach, off the main road, where we were the sole residents in the slightly shabby, but perfectly adequate and amazingly cheap Foxton Beach Motel, by a ...

... coated seal collapses, blood turning the clear blue ice red" (McConnico). Hunting is a central element to the Inuit culture of Greenland, but this way of life is facing the tough challenge that is climate change. The number of hunters in the area has dropped in recent years from nearly 500 to about 200. Yet this change presents opportunities. Twenty years ago, when visitors were rare, the fjords and ...

... of those nice information boards. It reckoned the walk would take approximately four hours from one side to the other, but as we didn't want to end up on the other side with another four hour walk back we decided to go for about two hours and then turn back. In principle, this meant we ought to be able to reach the scenic look-out in a couple of hours. So we set off up the trail, initially past a small meandering stream on man-made wooden paths ...

The world map has been serving as our coffee table for the past week and trips and routes have been shaped and re-shaped. We've gotten our financial situation figured out a bit more - and striving to be "mature adults" have made the difficult decision to cut our trip down by a month or two. Our new plan is perhaps not as ambitious but ...

So we've finally made a decision to come home - which I'm sure to many of you will come as a surprise. ...I hope a pleasant one. We have 6 months to finish our jobs, pack up a 3 bedroom house, ship our existence home, tie all lose ends and plan the biggest and longest trip of our lives. (To date at least.) Once the dust settles and we start coming up with a more definite itinerary I'll post something up ...

... chips and once on the north island we charged up the road to get as far north as possible before the light failed us. We ended up in a place called Otaki Beach in a wind-swept (replace 'swept' with 'battered'), dew-touched (or water-logged). deserted, run down park who's mean owners set the lights in all communal places to switch off after about 0.3 of a second. But it did the job.

From the delights of the high mountains to the coast. New Zealand is an island so there is a lot of coast line to choose from. We chose to head to Foxton, a small town on the Kapiti Coast. It also has a Dutch connection which we felt was appropriate. Foxton was home to a lot of Dutch settlers who moved to the area in the 19th century and ...

I had read in some guild book somewhere that there was great hiking off the coast of the north island on an island called Kapiti. I wasn't necessarily done with Wellington, but I was done with parking in Wellington so I decided to spend a day there, then drive up to a place called Paraparaumu Beach, which is where the ferries leave to get to the island. When I got there I checked out some prices to discover that the only ferry leaves at 7 am, cost $65 dollars for a ...

We drove all the way to river Valley in the middle of nowhere with the intention of doing white water rafting. However it was rained off due to flooding. The river was carrying trees and cows down it!!!! We did join a new bus and meet the new ...

They let the public into Farnborough International Airshow on Saturday and Sunday (after the mandatory British 2-hour traffic snarl-up), but in case you lose sight of it being a trade show you're greeted by the welcome billboard "The most capable troop carrier can carry troops across land and water" [which you'd think didn't really warrant mentioning, especially if you spend your working life test driving troop carriers ...