Slowly coming back from vacation

I'll admit I've been home from vacation for five days now. I'm feeling a little caught up at work, but I am just not ready to plunge back into whole PLN thing. But I will.

New Zealand, as I am sure many or you know and all of you suspect, is a wonderful place. Clean, friendly, eco-aware, geologically diverse - very, very cool. Unlike its neighbor Oz "across the ditch" NZ seems to have few dangerous creatures. While Australia has about 999 of the top 1,000 most venomous critters, about the best the Kiwis can do is a carnivorous snail. Pretty easy for even old guys like me to out run. Now the round-abouts running clockwise were scary, however!

My son Brady and I hiked the Abel Tasman coastal trail for five days. Some hiking, some kayaking, a little male bonding. Good food and rather luxurious lodging provided by the Wilson company. We like our outdoors, but at night it's wonderful to have a drink, a good meal, a hot shower and a comfortable bed. As Woody Allen admitted, "I am at two with nature." I was amazed by our young guide who hiked the entire tramp, including sharp shell-filled estuaries, bare-footed.

The only tragedy of the trip was my dropping my camera in the estuarial waters of Torrent Bay on the second to the last day of the hike. Happily the pictures I'd taken up to that point were OK. I have a bunch of pictures (for the terminally bored) saved on my SmugMug account here and here.

I am a little worried about my reluctance to end this vacation. I left the computer at home. I relished not having Internet access for much of the trip. I'm finding, like following a soap opera, one can skip quite a number of days and find the plot of education, libraries and technology pretty much in the same place as when one last tuned in. Sigh...

Back to playing with the iPad that came in during my absence.