They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in New Zealand but they do now have Black Friday sales.

Lee has done a lot to make the garden beautiful. And stuff just kind of grows here.

This immature specimen of the normally subterranean telephone tree is reaching out for a connection to others of its kind…

Let the exploration continue!

We hopped the ferry aaaallllll the way to Devonport last weekend, our first ferry ride here. It’s closer in real life than it looked on the map, so actually the ride only took about 12 minutes. Whatever. The boat itself was kinda cool, being built with the bow and stern identical so it can go in either direction without having to turn around.

When we got off it seemed like a different world, however. Warmer, sunnier. Microclimate?

We found some touristy shoppes, a drugstore where we picked up a few things, and a fabulous used bookstore (accumulating British first editions of John Carter books opens up a whole new can of worms). But maybe best of all, we found a hardware store!

We don’t have one in our neighborhood, and it’s been surprising how much we miss it. There are big-box home centers we can get to on the bus… but this was better.

So, loaded down with books, vitamins, and a couple of DIY projects, we decided to go mountain climbing.

Volcano? What volcano?

Oh, that volcano!!

Mt. Victoria only rises about 300 feet above the harbor, but that’s enough to have a say in who enters the harbor. Thus, Ft. Victoria and it’s enormous disappearing gun…

Only ever fired once, and not in anger… so many windows broke in town that they had to abort the testing or face an uprising!

After all that, we were more than ready for a café (with liquor license) to fortify us for the epic sea voyage home.

On Sunday morning we chanced across the Auckland Rose Society annual show. Many lovely roses, divided into almost as many classes as there were entries.

Not exactly “everyone’s a winner”, but close.

It was a pleasant and fragrant surprise, and it was also nice to go inside the Bishop Selwyn Library, part of the Cathedral at the top of the hill.

Along with jargon, I try to eschew the various Facebook ‘challenges’ that clog up the newsfeed. Facebook has won the keep in touch effortlessly game, but there’s soooo much noise and crap to wade through. 

But somehow, the current thing caught me: one B&W photo per day, no people, no explanations. Since I’ve been traveling this week, all the better.  I didn’t spread the virus, but I would recommend it. 

Here are my pics, color restored, with all the narrative details I wanted to put in…

At the achingly quaint Parnell Village shops (shoppes?). I was killing time while Lee was in the eyeglass shop. 

These big agaves (this one’s maybe 4 ft across) are a popular landscape plant here. We have some smaller ones in the patio. I walk past this one en route to work. 

Lake Rotorua, on whose shores I’m staying this week for a conference. 

A pukeko, aka purple swamp hen, in the Government Gardens I walked through en route to the conference each day. 

Workshop day, woo-hoo! Of course I like my work, and of course I get to see a lot in the places I am privileged to go do it. But still, there’s that wistful moment where you leave the things that make each place unique and special and enter the hotel conference room that is exquisitely engineered to be just the same as everywhere else. 

But it’s just a moment. With sponsorship from the Microsoft hegemony, we had an AMAZING dinner outing, hanging out for hours with old and new work-friends. 

Māori carving and the Prince’s Gate and Archway, Rotorua. The local people were pretty cooperative with the English, being relatively content with their hot pools and abundant everything, not nearly as warlike as some other areas. And of course, colonization. Anyway, when the Duke and Duchess of York came to visit in 1901, everything was quite cordial. As with many colonized peoples, the Māori have gone on to serve with distinction in His and Her Majesty’s military, and as a group are about as pro-Monarchy as anyone. 

So, thank you Marcus for getting me in this. I enjoyed the challenge of posting a picture every day, the added interest of doing it in black and white, and seeing other friends’ efforts. Some have been unsurprisingly artful and evocative, but others’ photo skills were more of a pleasant revelation. So, Facebook, keep up the good work until you can be replaced by something better. 

Yesterday I went on the weekly group ride organized by Mt. Eden Cycles, which seems like the bike shop I will most likely hang out at. Still haven’t found my pub away from home, but maybe I have a bike shop. 

Anyway, the route went up and down Scenic Drive in the Waitakeres, one of the most popular hilly routes within easy riding distance of central Auckland. It turns out that my bike’s gearing is too macho for me, with a 53-39 up front and only sporting a 23-tooth cog in the back. While I was grinding away up the hill, barely able to turn the pedals, other less fit people were blithely passing me, their legs moving in a much more comfortable rhythm.  I did get some respect at the après-velo coffee shop for not getting dropped worse in that gear, but it’s still preferable to just not get dropped at all. 

That gearing was pretty standard when the bike was new a dozen years ago, and is still what you’d commonly see on a serious racer’s bike, as long as lots of climbing wasn’t expected.  But I n recognition of the range of people who buy good road bikes these days (Chris Froome, but also myself, John Kerry, etc.), bike manufacturers have generally featured easier ratios in recent years. Luckily, it’s a cheap fix to switch out the rear cogs for something more civilized.

This route rolls around every fourth week, so next time I expect to be ready. 

Atop Mt. St. John, the 4th volcano I have summited on a lunchtime walk. 

Before humans arrived in New Zealand, there were no land mammals here. Now, we have rats and rabbits and possums and stoats and so on, all introduced by mistake. It’s probably impossible to put the toothpaste completely back into the tube, but there is an ongoing effort to keep the population of pests in check. 

My colleague Brendan, above, volunteers with the park service to periodically run a trap line out in the Waitakere range, mostly catching rats, and the occasional weasel or possum. He sent an invite around for people to join him this weekend and two of us did. 

Here’s Joni from Jakarta, a seemingly mild-mannered software developer, who turned out to be quite the woodsman…
Joni is looking at a fern known locally as hen and chicks, which makes fiddleheads that are apparently good to eat and definitely pretty…

We wandered around on a tiny little trail, through the forest for about 3 hours, with Brendan sharing lots of info about plants and trees and stuff. It was quite weird to not think about ticks or poison ivy or anything… there isn’t any poisonous or venomous stuff here at all.  At least not yet. 

We followed a beautiful little stream for a while…

Those stream pics look amazing with the new iPhone loop effect… it’s like living in Harry Potter land. 

This fern is growing out of a fallen tree trunk right in the stream. For reference it’s about 6 or 7 feet across. 

Although we didn’t cover all that much distance, about 5 miles, I’m happily exhausted from all the  bending under supplejack vines and dodging around tree ferns and slipping in the mud and stuff. 

I discovered this little park on a lunchtime walk a few weeks ago. Turns out it’s kind of a big deal.