Month: August 2018

  • Australasian Adventures, Part 5 (Heading Inland)

    As mentioned earlier, we didn’t spend much time away from the coastline during our adventures except for a couple of days on New Zealand’s North Island. I already wrote about the geothermal sites. We saw several additional noteworthy sites during our inland jaunt as well. Hobbiton My older son watched the entire Lord of the…

  • Australasian Adventures, Part 4 (Geothermal)

    New Zealand anchored the southwestern end of the Ring of Fire, a long strand of seismic and volcanic activity on the outer edges of the Pacific Ocean. Here the earth’s tectonic plates collided, with results particularly apparent on the nation’s North Island. No active volcanoes currently threatened although cracks and fissures hissed angrily in numerous…

  • Australasian Adventures, Part 3 (Vistas)

    I’ve always liked climbing to the heights, whether by foot, automobile or elevator. Fortunately the parts of New Zealand and Australia we visited included many such opportunities. Some were man-made while others appeared as natural features on the magnificent terrain. Most days brought plenty of chances to appreciate the scenery in all kinds of different…

  • Australasian Adventures, Part 2 (On the Waterfront)

    We rarely ventured more than a few kilometres from water. New Zealand made that pretty easy, being composed of islands after all. We also stuck to a rather narrow band of eastern Australia beginning with Sydney and driving north along the coast for about three hours. Almost every scenic vista we found included a body…