October 18 – 27 We left Tombstone on a clear morning with blue skies that would follow us all day.  We decided not to stop in the downtown area (if you could call it that) to see the tourist street, multiple blocks of recreated late 1870’s cowboy town playing off the famous shoot out at […]

January 8 – 10, 2024 As mentioned in the last post, we turned in our rental bikes and walked to nearby Rosie’s Red-Hot Cantina and Taco Joint to grab a drink and a snack.  We wouldn’t need much as having learned from our experience the night before, I’d made a dinner reservation at a place […]

January 8 – 10, 2024 Bright and early the next morning the Quigley’s shuttled us to the bus stop in town for our four-hour ride to Wellington.  The bus driver checked us in on an iPad and after storing our luggage we climbed aboard and settled in for the journey.  Arriving in Wellington, we pulled […]

January 5 – 7, 2024 On the way back to the house in two cars, ours made a brief stop at Cooks Gardens, a multi-purpose stadium that is currently used mostly for rugby union matches, athletics and cycling.  The main stadium, known as Westpac Stadium, can hold 20,700 people with 3,500 covered seats and while […]

January 5 – 7, 2024 Our bus ride today would be one of the longest of the trip, requiring that we head west to Hamilton, and then turn south for Whanganui, our eventual destination.  It would take us over seven hours given the number of stops that the bus would be making along the way, […]

January 2 – 4, 2024 We finished up at the Redwood Grove and motored a short distance to the Living Village.  It is a semi-rural geothermal area in the Taupō Volcanic Zone that was the site of the Māori fortress of Te Puia, first occupied around 1325, and known as an impenetrable stronghold never taken […]

January 2 – 4, 2024 We finished at Winona Forever and called a couple of Ubers (Auckland didn’t have any large enough for all five of us) to get us to the Sky City Bus Terminal on Hobson Street, where we arrived soon after.  This, our first interaction with the bus system, would be mildly […]

December 28, 2023 – January 1, 2024 Our last day in Auckland would be a lazy one, with Joanna and Marty heading off to the Auckland War Memorial Museum while Kim, Bev and I would Uber to the harbor and stroll about there.  The museum is one of New Zealand’s most important museums and war […]

December 28, 2023 – January 1, 2024 Our first full day in New Zealand would turn out to be an exciting one, with a long and exciting e-bike tour in the morning capped off by a nice dinner and then trying to manage to stay awake until midnight.  It was a challenge all around but […]

December 28, 2023 – January 1, 2024 The Christmas holiday arrived, and we hosted this year as there would be a very short turnaround between the 25th and our flight to Auckland on the 28th.  I met with my eye surgeon on the 27th who confirmed that the blood was clearing out and all looked […]

December 28 – February 6 Throughout the second half of 2023 we began to actively plan for our long-delayed journey to New Zealand and Australia.  Between Covid and various health issues, we’d pushed the trip back two years and now with my sister Bev’s pending retirement, we could move forward with filling in the details […]