The Northern Explorer train trip & Wellington

Over the course of something like 11 hours, The Northern Explorer train took us through beautiful scenery from Auckland to Wellington.

Below are 11 photos from the train and 76 photos from Wellington (mostly taken in the botanic garden).

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Waiheke Island & Waiheke Ferry trip

My husband and I stayed overnight in the airport hotel in Sydney at the beginning of our Australia/New Zealand holiday. Then we moved on and met his parents in a hotel in Auckland. We didn’t really do anything in Auckland except take a daytrip to Waiheke Island.

Below are 12 photos from our visit to Waiheke Island, where I admired the flowers, tasted some local wine, and bought a small brass bird sculpture.

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Asian Civilisations Museum

My husband and I went to the Asian Civilisations Museum.

We walked through all the exhibits that were open. We saw the Tang shipwreck exhibit, the Chinese scholar exhibit, the Chinese ceramics exhibit, the performing arts exhibit, the trade exhibit, the Islamic foyer, and the ancient religions exhibit.

Below are notes on a couple of the things we saw.

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Montville, Queensland, Australia

I enjoyed my recent trip to Australia—or, as I like to call it, The Place Where Some of the Coins Are Huge, Most the Flowers Are Purple and All the Birds Are Really Weird. I went there to attend a writers’ retreat with two writer friends.

See below for about 50 photos selected from over 200 in total. (About a quarter were out-of-focus shots of flowers, and another 25% were of a very cooperative kookaburra that sat still while I took photos of him for 20 minutes.)

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Rerouted!

What should have been a twenty-four-hour, three-airport trip from Atlanta to Singapore turned into a thirty-plus-hour, five-airport trip.

I watched another seven-and-a-half movies.

There are two red symbols on top of Tokyo, one for each of the airports I was at (Narita and Haneda).

The reason my trip got longer was that at some point while we were flying over Canada, someone on the plane had a stroke. We backtracked to Minneapolis/St. Paul to get him off the plane and then the plane had to be refueled and paperwork filled out.

I missed my connecting flight at Tokyo Narita Airport because of the delay. Delta issued new tickets, but I had to collect my luggage and wait for Delta to put me on a bus to the Tokyo Haneda Airport (about an hour away). Delta gave me about $20 in meal vouchers which I used to buy a nice dinner at a katsu restaurant.

It was a lot of extra travel time, but it wasn’t really so bad for me. I spoke with a guy who had been on a flight from Florida to Atlanta before being re-routed on the flight from Atlanta to Narita, and his new flight to Seoul took off a couple of hours after mine.

Obviously the one with the worst luck was the man with the stroke. I hope he’s okay…

I remember what they said to us at Mammoth Cave: once you start the tour, there is no magic button to get you out if something goes wrong underground. Similarly, it takes time to come back from the sky when something goes wrong on a plane.

See below for photos taken at Haneda.

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SIN > NRT > ATL

My trip to visit my parents in Atlanta looked like this, more or less. It took me over 24 hours to get there.

I watched two movies on the way from Singapore to Tokyo and another two and a half on the way from Tokyo to Atlanta.

I made the map using http://myflightbook.com.

Changi Airport is very pretty, and always trying (sometimes successfully) to beat Incheon for the title of Best Airport Anywhere.
This terminal at Narita has undergone renovation, and the origami store I remember from a previous visit is gone. The bookstore, however, remains.
I hope this Narita shop never closes! The stuff it sells is more varied than the stuff at a typical airport souvenir shop.