Mark: Hey look – there’s a big mountain in the middle of Taranaki. Let’s go climb it! Allie: Uh, OK. And with those famous nearly-last words, we find ourselves climbing straight up the side of Mt. Taranaki, the North Island’s second highest mountain at 2,518 meters, and as a nearly perfect cone volcano, one of […]
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Hi everyone, thanks for the kind messages. We just got back online after spending the last two days in Tongariro National Park. The Christchurch quake happened shortly before we went offline, so we’re just now coming to grips with the extent of the damage. We are on the North Island in Palmerston North, and all […]
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Fourteen hours on an Air New Zealand flight, and we exchange the snowy landscape of Tahoe for this lovely green country in the middle of summer. This is Mark’s first time to New Zealand, and a return trip for me. I lived here for a year on a school exchange program, in the ag/college town […]
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A few weekends ago our friends Ann and Leif visited us with their two children, Catherine and Henry. Catherine is four and testing out her voice by singing lines from Do-Re-Mi, a song from the movie The Sound of Music. Catherine got the movie as a Christmas present, but Ann had only just been introduced […]
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