Further Wanderings

(If I can’t name all my posts after popular songs I can at least make them alliterative)

It doesn’t take long to begin feeling at home again in a place you’ve previously spent a couple of months. Especially when you’ve got two wonderful and gracious hosts who do things like picking you up at the airport following an 05:45 arrival and offering you a room in their home for a full week. As you may have guessed, this isn’t simply an idle, irrelevant observation. I DO have two such hosts (Oliver and Christine Woodbridge, very good friends of my sister Christi) and I DID start to feel at home in New Zealand in no time flat. After picking me up at the airport, we return to their home in the far southern suburb of Papakura. They claimed it was a sketchy part of town, but I had nothing but good (if quiet) experiences there.

Central Papakura. It doesn’t LOOK like an rough area of the biggest city in the country, does it? To me, it looked and felt like the main street of a nice little town. Not the most interesting photo, true but you all want to read about day-to-day living in addition to excitement and adventure and “tourist highlights” right? I hope so, because there’s probably a fair bit of that kind of thing coming up.
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I really don’t know the song Sunset Boulevard, but it works in two ways. First, it follows general theme I’ve set for entry titles, and second it continues with the trend towards increasing geographical precision that started with the previous two. Which is to say, in rather more words than were necessary, that almost all of my time in Los Angeles was spent at my friend Nick’s place near the intersection of Sunset and Vine.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame near Nick’s place. That’s Michael Jackson at the bottom of the picture. Woo!
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I could have kept up with the theme of deliberately tacky post titles in an even better way by using the words “left my heart in,” but I like the Scott McKenzie song better. The primary point of my visit to ... [Continue reading this entry]

I know what you're thinking... He didn't actually decide to title a post about California "California Dreaming," did he? You bet I did. This is one writer who has no problem with self-aware use of cliches. And besides that, ... [Continue reading this entry]

In keeping with my plans to limit my writing to merely vast reams rather than the utterly ridiculously vast reams, we'll just stick with a quick description of my annual pilgrimage to the World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA. Friend, roommate, ... [Continue reading this entry]