Rosedawn Ramblings

I'm feeling a little bit lost. After all those weeks of travelling and running in different, interesting and sometimes exotic locations, we're home again now. The last place we ran before coming home was Victor Harbour... It looked like this: Whilst away, I ran regularly but never more than 3 or 4 miles at a time, so home again, I set myself the goal of gradually increasing my longest runs each week. I was even quietly contemplating an autumn marathon. I built up over 3 or 4 weeks to a long run of 10 miles and was feeling positive. And then came  back down to earth with a bump after an unexpected visit to my GP resulted in surgery under general anaesthetic less than 24 hours later. Wounds are healing and pain is receding but I'm not allowed to run. It's been 3 weeks and counting... Grumpy to say the least.  So what to do? How to keep myself occupied and not just sit and eat chocolate all day?  I've been doing as much walking as pain levels and gener...

Time is about to be called on Big Trip 2015. We're at our final destination and have just a few days left of our travels to enjoy. We spent the Easter Bank Holiday weekend in Adelaide. It felt a little strange being back in a city, with traffic and people and shopping centres, but we managed to escape to see the sea on Good Friday - the sun shone on the first of the bank holidays as we joined an exodus from the city on the tram down to Glenelg. Blue skies, clear water, sunshine and ice creams followed by fish and chips back in the city with friends of friends... Just what bank holidays were made for! We also had time to explore a couple of museums and galleries - the South Australian Museum had an interesting exhibit with Antarctic connections which Jon got lost in for a while and I enjoyed the exhibits on indigenous arts and crafts as well. We found a Bradman exhibit at the State Library as well as a display of WW1 photos. I found an odd but definitely fascinating exhibiti...

Due to a slight mix-up with hotel bookings and onward bus connections, we found ourselves "stuck" in Twizel for 27 hours. Twizel (pronunciation wise, it "rhymes" with Tideswell) was established in the 1960s to house workers brought to the area to construct NZ's largest hydro electric scheme, connecting the existing and newly created lakes with massive canals and a network of dams. It was only supposed to be a temporary town but was saved from the bulldozers by construction workers and their families, who had grown attached to their new homes and wanted to stay in the area. The Rough Guide to NZ suggests destruction would have been a "kinder fate", which sounds a bit harsh. Admittedly, it doesn't have quite the same draw as its near neighbours of Lake Tekapo and Mount Cook, but it can't be that bad, can it?  We set ourselves the challenge of finding 27 things to do in Twizel in our 27 hours in town. We've done some of them, but not all, as w...

Every week of our trip has been filled with amazing experiences or fantastic locations and our time in Tekapo and Aoraki/Mount Cook has not disappointed either. We've gone from the dawn of time to the far reaches of the universe in just a few days. We headed for Lake Tekapo for one main reason and that was to see the stars like never before. Tekapo is a "dark star reserve", meaning that there is very little light pollution and lots of clear nights. There is an observatory at the top of Mount John on the lake's western shore and, after being put off by lots of clouds on Tuesday when we arrived, we booked in for a tour on Wednesday night.  The only uncertainty was the weather. I spent most of Wednesday looking up at the sky and wishing I was an expert meteorologist... the clouds were clearing, the clouds were coming back, what was the wind doing, did the location/position of the moon make any difference? I think "a bag of nerves" would be the best description ...

Queenstown confuses me! The centre of the town is a cross between a university campus, with backpacker hostels instead of halls of residence, a typical Friday night in most UK city centres (cue drunkenness, inappropriate clothing and kebabs), the seafront in Blackpool (haunted houses and stag nights) and the waterfront in Cape Town (expensive bars, international restaurants and tourist-related gift emporiums). It's a small place in terms of actual population but is more like a city centre, especially at night... the late opening hours, young population, nightclubs and a casino make it unlike most other places in NZ outside Auckland and Wellington. Every other shopfront is for a tour company trying to convince you that their offering is really the only way to 'do' Queenstown.  You can't just go for a river cruise, you have to go white water rafting or ride a jet boat at high speeds as close to the rocks as possible. A walk in some of the most stunning scenery I've ev...

Sitting surrounded by the green trees and steep peaks of Milford Sound, waiting for the bus to depart. We've just competed our 2 hour cruise and the sun has come out. It has been a stunning and incredible experience, the dramatic scenery of Fjordland changing minute by minute as our boat toured the far reaches of Milford Sound in ever varying weather conditions. We watched a rain shower come down the fjord then the clouds lift as we travelled out in the Tasman Sea.  The rain brought waterfalls and our boat got in very close so we could feel the water cascading down...  The sun broke through and the summit of Mitre Peak (one mile above us) tempted us through the clouds, almost but not quite visible. The word 'wow' was definitely overused as we experienced Milford Sound today. The journey into and out of Milford was also pretty spectacular... driving along the shores of Lake Te Anau, travelling through the Eglington and Hollyford valleys, catching our first glimpse of the sno...