Tiffany and Greg Around the World
From Tortoise orgies to custom made giraffe barns, the Great Kiwi Roadtrip makes it’s way to the Auckland Zoo!
One of the things that we absolutely had to see in New Zealand was an actual live kiwi
(Finally: the bird, not to be confused with the people by the same name)
Being as we were road tripping the length of the country these birds call home, we thought this was going to be relatively easy. Turns out that it’s not…
Continue reading “Kiwis (The birds, not the people)”
The Kiwi Roadtrip continues!
At long last we finally come to it. Our grail, our Mecca, our El Dorado, our own little land of Canaan in New Zealand, if you will. (yeah, we’re still reading the Bible.)
The culmination of our quest, the living beating heart of our journey (well this part anyway), the Vegas of our Great Kiwi Roadtrip…
(Aka Larnach Castle)
There remained but one final obstacle to overcome, one last trial to endure before the castle would indeed be ours as the very land itself conspired to bar our path… Continue reading “Storming the Hedges”
New Zealand – South Island
Type: Brewery
Rating: 4 sheets to the wind
Website: http://www.monteiths.co.nz/
Notes: When called back to a bachelor party in Las Vegas for his own former best man, Greg could have brought his choice of any variety of drinks…but he chose Monteith’s original ale. A beer deemed “delicious” by the at-that-time bachelor & assorted cadre of miscreants. Continue reading “NZ South Island Grog Files”
New Zealand – North Island
Type: Soft Drink
Rating: 3 sheets to the wind
Website: http://www.cokecareers.co.nz/products
(yeah, Coke bought ‘em. That’s globozation for ya.)
Notes: It would be wrong to have a page about the drinks of New Zealand and not mention Lemon & Paeroa. It’s the New Zealand soft drink and we’re really not sure why it hasn’t become a world-wide sensation! Like you’ll see in other places on this page, New Zealand does not save their best efforts for “the good stuff” because even their widely distributed common drinks are just excellent. Continue reading “NZ North Island Grog Files”
Auckland, New Zealand
Jumping ahead a few entries here. Don’t worry we’ll get back to the Great Kiwi Roadtrip soon enough but something else takes precedence. April 25th was ANZAC day. “What is that?” You might ask.
…And that right there is the problem.
It isn’t your fault that you don’t know. For us, we’d heard the word “ANZAC” before but didn’t really understand what it was (Australia / New Zealand Army Corps). Then we got to New Zealand and during our many journeys here we discovered something – New Zealanders really love their soldiers.
As long as you don’t mind the pressing need to bundle up in order to explore a land listed as “one of the closest to Antarctica” it’s sometimes hard to decide which is more magnificent, the countryside around Dunedin or the immaculate buildings in the city itself:
This is the third in a 3 part series on how to prevent and overcome seasickness by Greg. Take a look at the first two articles.
Mindset is critical. After all, seasickness is all in your head. No, seriously, it is (and yes, that means it’s all in my head too).
The short explanation for the reason people get seasick is that their mind is attempting to compensate their sense of balance with what they see and feel. (Long explanation here.) On a boat, what people see and feel for motion don’t always line up like they do on land. The mind gets confused in a new environment with odd motions and then wham, down you go.
So can someone literally think them self sick? Yes. Yes they can. That’s another reason for all the preventative methods. Dumbo has his feather and I have my eucalyptus oil. Placebo or not, who cares? It works and I even smell better than Dumbo. The good news is that you can also use the same mental effect to feel better. Though there is no cure for seasickness, I have witnessed time and again people feeling significantly better when forced to steer the boat by hand.
Yes people, the ship’s auto pilot is the enemy here – turn it off. There are a few possible explanations for why this works:
Often when writing a blog entry we look back on the last few articles in order to remind ourselves where we left off. This time we reviewed the road trip video and, well, frankly… Wow, that was a terrible resolution. Not to mention a terribly long video. Since we are writing these trip entries for ourselves as much as you all and since there is no way we’re going to leave that on the site we redid the road trip. Each entry from then until now just got a new and different 1 minute clip of our adventures driving down the coast. Because road trips are all about the little things like cows stopping traffic and “ocean golf.” So if you wanted to see all the little things like Tiffany dancing in a kiwi hat and Greg’s adventures with roundabouts, that’s where they are.
Continue reading “Where the Scots ended up”
This is the second in a 3 part series on how to prevent and overcome seasickness by Greg. The first article can be found here.
1) Sooner or later, just about everyone deals with seasickness
2) You either take action to prevent it or suffer the consequences
I have managed to only get seasick a few times in my life (which was more than enough) and I have successfully sailed though 40 knots of wind and 18 foot seas with the rest of the crew down for the count. Except for Tiffany of course, Tiffany was happy as a clam down in the galley cooking. Unlike Tiffany, the secret to my success is not near-godlike fortitude – it’s planning ahead.
Yes, it takes planning to look this good.
Being proactive is crucial because once you get sick, there is little you can do except suffer though it, and working while sick sucks. Strike that. Horrible. It’s horrible enough that over the past decade I’ve spent no small amount of my time testing every home remedy I could find over until I found the stuff that actually works.
Continue reading “Seasickness – Prevention is the only cure”
The Great Kiwi Roadtrip continues!!
Stepping off the Interislander Ferry had us stepping into one of the major wine regions of New Zealand: Marlborough. Where sheep, kittens, vineyards and Kiwis all seem to have figured out a way to coexist:
